One highlight:
Deirdre was part of the team that planned and launched Apple’s very first online and retail stores. She has been a part of Retail’s exciting expansion and every product launch since. She knows the value of the deep human connections that retail experiences make possible — and she knows this is where Apple shows its heart and soul.
Good letter. Follow the headline link to read the whole thing.
No announcement of Angela leaving for another company (although, tongue in cheek wouldn’t it be interesting if it was Tesla), so sounds like it’s an involuntary, although not acrimonious exit. Perhaps there were some internal metrics to which she failed to deliver on or, as more often the case, conflict of personalities at the top levels.
As a former Retail employee, I certainly wasn’t impressed by the recent Town Hall ideas presented if only because the stores are just too damn busy. Perhaps in the flagship ones, they’re more accommodating, but in your average mall, the stores need serious rethinking.
OK I’ll bite… the stores are ‘too hectic’ and ‘too damn busy’…. and you think this caused them to fire her? Are you KIDDING? “Sorry retail chief, you have too many customers in your store! If this keeps up they might buy something and then what??”
In an environment when brick and mortar retail is seeing foot traffic drop, people are saying AA might have been fired for bringing in too much of it?
Now… Is it possible she wanted to move retail in a different path than Tim et al? Closing more small stores etc? Sure. Could also be that she does, in fact, have plans and they’re not being made public yet for reasons. we can surmise with confidence that she wasn’t doing anything egregious and fired for that because she’s around for 3 months.
Not sure if your comment was partially in response to mine, but I wasn’t implying that she was fired because the stores were too busy, but that the recent programs she introduced “Today at Apple” etc, do not work well in the smaller stores because of the amount of traffic in them.
Try doing a presentation at one table of six in the back of the store where the Genius bar is. The stores are loud (metal walls and stone floors don’t absorb sound so well), there’s people all around and the poor folks who are there are trying to listen and learn over all of that. They work much better where there’s a dedicated learning/meeting space that has some separation from the retail and genius areas of the store (red zone/family room if you want to get into store lingo).
But, here’s the thing, the stores were busy before she joined the company but were they as busy as before or does Apple see a decline in traffic that we, as consumers, don’t see, that her programs were targeted at reversing and perhaps they weren’t. This makes sense to me as a potential reason for her departure because it’s not an egregious error, but it’s just not the results that Apple wanted at this point.
Certainly, Tim Cook’s statement about resetting the relationship between the company and the customer (paraphrasing), is indicative that the plan AA had was not the one Cook and others felt where it should be.
Only partly in reply to you – the BI article linked also had a comment about them being too busy which strikes me as a silly complaint to raise about a retail store.
The smaller store issue you raise is a good one and I can certainly see that a divergence of visions between her and Cook could cause her to depart.
There must be 2 or 3 people in the United States who have enjoyed going to an Apple Store (or is it Store? or Apple? can’t remember) in the last 2 years. Everyone else finds them very unpleasant places with very high noise levels and extreme difficulty getting retail service. Take away the cash register for small stock purchases – genius! Have me hand over my credit card to a person who’s only identification is a shirt and have her disappear with it for five minutes – courage! Make the technical service so obscure and difficult that ordinary humans would rather go to Microcenter and switch to Wintel – that takes real Fashion Sense. And so on.
“everyone else” – so… you know how everyone feels? No. You don’t. So speak for yourself, not ‘everyone’.
I never have an issue getting service and I like the elimination of registers because they can take my card right there and I don’t end up standing in line for 15 minutes while one poor, overworked cashier tries to get everyone rung up.
Oh and please DO switch to wintel. People like you who spend time trolling Apple sites only to bitch and whine how they SHOULD switch but somehow never do are a waste of bandwidth.
That’s the attitude! Insanely great customer service!!
The head of retail who types an upscale approach is not needed in these “populist” times. All I know is Apple Stores are terrible these days.