brand. Apple’s stores sell nearly $5,000 per square foot. Number 2 is a
convenience store, which lags by 50 percent.^32 It wasn’t the iPhone,
but the Apple Store, that defined Apple’s success.
- Global
Rich people are more homogeneous than any cohort on earth. I
recently spoke at JPMorgan’s Alternative Investment Summit. Its
CEO, Jamie Dimon, hosts the bank’s three hundred most important
(crazy rich) private bank clients and the fifty or so CEOs and founders
of the funds into which they invest for their private bank clients. Four
hundred masters of the universe, plus people whom the universe has
smiled upon (the Lucky Sperm Club). People from nearly every
country and culture... and yet a sea of sameness. Everyone in the
room speaks the same language (literally and figuratively), wears
Hermès, Cartier, or Rolex, has kids at Ivy League schools, and
vacations in a coastal town of Italy or France or St. Barts. Fill a room
with middle-class people from around the world, and you have
diversity. They eat different food, wear different clothes, and can’t
understand each other’s languages. It’s anthropology on parade. The
global elite, by contrast, is a rainbow of the same damn color.
That’s why it’s easier for luxury brands to permeate geographic
boundaries than mass market peers. Mass market retailers, including
Walmart and Carrefour, have to hire ethnographers to guide them in
local markets. But luxury brands, including Apple, define their own
universe. Iconic brand consistency is achieved by key design elements:
glass—a glass pane, a cube, or cylinder as an entry, often a clear glass
staircase, patented by Jobs; open space, minimal interiors, no
inventory in store (products are brought out to purchase). The 492
stores, dropped into exclusive shopping districts in eighteen countries,
draw more than 1 million worshippers every day.^33 The Magic
Kingdom only drew 20.5 million people total in 2015.^34
Apple also runs a global supply chain. The components stream in,
from Chinese mines, Japanese studios, and American chip fabs, to
contractors’ immense manufacturing plants and settlements in
multiple nations (notably, and notoriously, China), and then on to
Apple stores, both brick and mortar and online. Meanwhile, the