This is a glorious illustration. It reminds me of what it was like to live in Japan, only my apartment was smaller.
(via innocence-walker)
J.J.’s guide to waiting in line at the Apple Store
Just go to the store and stand in the line outside the entrance for a few hours. After a while, they’ll let you in and you’ll be able to buy your thing. That’s really all there is to it.
Despite my closest friends’ most furious opposition, I did, in fact, wait in line for the new iPad 3 for several hours last night, rather than merely pre-order it online like the sane people of the world. I was after the “experience,” and while I’m glad I had it, I’d be lying if I said it was terribly memorable or interesting.
Before I left, I read a lot of purported “line survival guides” from websites like Gizmodo and such, which offer a lot of very authoritive sounding tips and tricks. Bring lots of snacks to win over friends, they say. Make sure you have lots of entertainment. A folding chair is an absolute necessity. All of this turned out to be mostly useless advice.
The Apple Store I was courting was located inside a large suburban mall. The place was set to open at 8:00, and I was paranoid about showing up too late, so I arrived at the mall’s designated iPad lineup zone, by the side entrance, at around three a.m. The guys in front of me said I was the first new person to arrive in two hours. There were probably about 20 people in total by then. 30 minutes later another guy arrived, and he was the only new addition for at least another hour. In other words, if I had arrived at five it would have made little difference. The vast majority of the 100 or so people who would eventually get their pads arrived within an hour of opening time, I would say. You have to remember that Apple is in the business to make money here, and there’s not a lot of financial gain to be had from turning away vast swatches of customers simply because they weren’t insane enough to sacrifice a good night’s sleep.
Waiting outside for five hours is one of those things that seems incredibly daunting and ominous until you actually do it. The fellow behind me was pleasant and chatty; the two of us ended up passing the time mostly by engaging in polite banter about our lives and interests. I was never really bored, and I certainly didn’t need any of the books I brought. Nor was I ever starving. I had a granola bar at one point, that was probably enough. Everyone had their own food, so there was no need to share.
Nor was there any cutthroat protection of the sanctity of the line order, something a number of the websites made seem like a Very Big Deal. People wandered in and out of line as they pleased, sauntering off to get coffee or relieve themselves and then wandering back to their old place a half hour later without anyone batting much of an eye. A lot of people near the front expanded their spots to absorb their various straggler friends who drifted in over the course of the night, so the whole line regime was exceedingly relaxed, to say the least.
Overall, I’d characterize the thing as little more than a very ordinary and perfunctory exercise in standing and waiting (no one sat, by the way), and a far cry away from the lively tailgate party atmosphere I had been led to anticipate. The climate was neither social nor entertaining, and it was mostly a quiet, austere scene out there under the concrete awning and inky night sky. Most members of the largely all-male crowd were humorless Asian men in their 20s or 30s, a number of whom I perhaps unfairly presumed were buying pads merely to resell them on Craigslist at inflated prices the next day.
So in conclusion, it’s not really something I’d recommend to other people. I lost a lot of sleep, which made me kind of sickly and irritable, and all the pre-order people ended up getting their iPads in the mail first thing that morning, so there wasn’t even any gloating to be gained.
The only real tips I can give to future line-goers would be to dress warmer than you would for a typical jaunt outdoors (it’s easy to forget that the temperature drops significantly after midnight) and put yourself in an upbeat, social mood so that you can engage in some light and breezy conversation with your immediate line-mates. If my experience was in any way typical, everything else — the snacks, the time of arrival, the various other obsessions over comfort and entertainment — are of extremely negligible importance for any adult who has already experienced some other minor episode of prolonged low-level boredom, like, say, a delayed flight.
And the feeling of satisfaction one receives for enduring it is about the same as well.
