Apple wants the Apple store to be the cool place for teens to hang out (AAPL)

pulse

April 25, 2017 2:56 PM

Apple's goal is "if Gen Z says, 'Meet me at Apple. Did you see what’s going on at Apple today?'"

Angela Ahrendts, Apple's Senior Vice President of Retail

Apple announced on Tuesday a program called "Today at Apple" that will schedule programming and classes at Apple stores around the US.

The goal is to make the Apple store a place to spend time in, and build "community," Apple's head of retail Angela Ahrendts said in an interview broadcasted on CBS This Morning.

"A lot of the big online guys have said they’re opening stores. Amazon’s investing in stores. Google’s investing in stores. Starbucks figured it out, you know? Being a gathering place. Right? ‘Meet me at Starbucks,'" Ahrendts told CBS.

"And you know, I’ve told the teams, I’ll know we’ve done a really, really great job if the next generation, if Gen Z says, 'Meet me at Apple. Did you see what’s going on at Apple today?'"

Ahrendts likes to use a metaphor to describe Apple's stores, which she calls the company's "largest product."

"We kind of talk about it inside, this is the largest product Apple produces. So if you think about it, the architecture, which is the hardware of the store. And the software is what happens in the store and how we basically turn on Apple Music, and the App Store. So we started with the hardware," Ahrendts said, referring to Apple's highly publicized recent redesign of certain important stores.

And classes and programming will be the "software" of the Apple store. "“So we call the software of the store that we are launching the end of May – we call that Today at Apple.”

Apple held an important internal retail meeting featuring video remarks from Angela Ahrendts on Sunday.