Pickup
Apple’s pickup stations have made visiting an Apple store a more streamlined & pleasant experience.
Visiting an Apple store is always a pleasure; an outing often associated with purchasing or playing with an exciting new piece of tech. There's a palpable energy surrounding Apple Stores, particularly around product launches, that you don't experience anywhere else.
But as Apple has grown, their smaller retail stores have begun to feel hemmed in. Pre-Covid, Apple Stores were packed to the gills, with hundreds of customers and dozens upon dozens of staff racing around. Every conceivable surface was occupied to complete a purchase, perform a repair, or demo a product. It was amongst this entropic chaos that I often found myself on the hunt for any available staff member, an anxious and crazed look on my face as I raced towards any idle associate before someone else got to them first. It was crowded and unclear. Then Covid happened.
An old 2010 photo inside Apple Fifth Avenue in NYC.
The early days of the pandemic required Apple to retool its retail strategy. Gone were the throngs of people, replaced by lockdowns or intense crowd control. To handle this, Apple began to strongly encourage or limit store access to online ordering and in-store pickup. During heights of the pandemic, this queuing system even required scheduling a specific 15-minute pickup windows, not unlike the crowd control measures used during iPhone launches. During your allotted time, you would line up at a makeshift pickup area, flash your QR code, and be handed the product you'd ordered online. It took a pandemic, but Covid-19 made visiting an Apple retail store a faster, streamlined, and more pleasant experience.
Apple seems to have seized on to the success of the pickup service, and in many of its recent stores, it has begun to incorporate beautiful and prominent pickup stations as a pillar of its retail layout. From The Grove to Rosenthaler Straße, many flagship stores are beginning to feature dedicated pickup stations for customers, featuring magnificent white oak counters and panelling. It was this beautifully grained white oak that became the basis of my latest wallpaper.
The pickup counter at Apple Rosenthaler Straße. Photo credit: Filip Chudzinski. Filip runs an excellent account chronicling the beauty of Apple Retails stores as @storetellee.
But I didn't use just any old stock image for this wallpaper. This wallpaper is extra special because the wood used in the backsplash comes from an actual Apple Store. I connected with Michael Steeber, who has a prolific collection & knowledge of Apple history, to ask about using one of his photos as the basis for this wallpaper. His photography was instrumental in creating an elegant wallpaper that is textured and complex, yet undistracting.
Apple uses a beautiful white oak for its tables, shelves, displays, and counters in their latest retail stores. This photo comes courtesy of Michael Steeber, who runs an exceptional website and newsletter about the history of Apple retail stores.
The wallpaper is available for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, and versions are available both with & without a logo. Enjoy!
Downloads
Kudos
My thanks to Michael Steeber for permission to use his white oak photo & to Filip Chudzinski of Storetellee (Twitter/IG) for allowing me to use his photograph from Apple Rosenthaler Straße. If you have a passion for Apple Store lore, these two are must follows!
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