“Apple isn’t letting the recession slow its retail ambitions,” Jefferson Graham reports for USA Today.
“The company said Wednesday that it plans to remodel 100 of its stores this year, to make more room for customer training and displayed products. Additionally, it will open 25 new stores, including a fourth location in New York City, and new ones in Paris, Italy and Germany,” Graham reports. “”‘We know that a lot of people are cutting back, but we’re doing the opposite,’ says Ron Johnson, Apple’s senior vice president of retail. ‘We’re investing in the downturn.'”
MacDailyNews Note: “We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.” – Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Fortune, February 2008
Graham continues, “The company… plans face-lifts for older stores to emphasize customer-service programs. Some 170 million folks visit Apple Stores yearly.”
Full article here.
