We generally avoided the retail experience while in NYC except for a few home furnishing stores scattered around Manhattan. However, as proud iPod Nano owners, we had to experience the 3-week-old Apple store on Fifth Avenue and 59th street, just below Central Park. Without irony, its 32-foot-sided cube sits in front of the city-block-sized and 50-storied General Motors building. Apple Computer's market cap is over 3 times that of GM's. You can get big by staying little if you can keep your cool! GM has proved you can get little by staying big and uncool. On the other hand, with 5% of the PC market share, should we rename Steve Job's company Apple iPods?
This is probably the most elegant entrance to a basement store you will find. (Apple provides voluminous pictures of the 20,000 square foot retail space below ground at its web site). (Apple has become quite the electronic retailer, outselling Best Buy per square foot by 250%. Five thousand Apple bigots applied for the 300 positions below this cube.)
After descending the glass staircase, we found the basement jammed with people looking at all sorts of huge (and overpriced) contraptions that plug into the tiny iPods (over 200 iPods and a hundred Macs were cabled to the shelves). Had we looked hard enough, I'm sure we could have found a device to plug our 1.5 ounce iPod into a GM SUV, turning it into the world's largest user-controlled mobile entertainment system. Now that's progress! And, you can shop here 24 hours a day, 365 days a year in case you need to buy a gift at 11 at night on Christmas Day.