What if the Apple Store billed by the hour?

A few weeks ago, I was out to dinner with my wife and girls. Nearby was an Apple Store, so while we waited, I scurried over for a quick purchase. I needed to get a new antiglare plastic sheet for my iPhone. Not for the glare, mind you; the screen protector does a great job at repelling fingerprints and other smudges. (Here’s a link.)

Keep in mind, I was going to buy what is probably the least expensive item in the Apple Store.

So I get to the store and I make my way over to the iPhone accessories (there are about six million of them). I grab a screen protector and take a moment to see if there’s anything else I need (need being a vague term here). A store representative, Anil (or it could have been Pete or Algernon; I don’t remember the names, so I’m inventing them. It’s dramatic license, so deal with it) comes over and asks me if I need any help. Not in a hovering, vulturelike salesperson way, but in a I’m-here-to-help way.

“No,” I say, holding up my screen protector and my iPhone. “I just needed to get this.”

“Great. But that particular protector is for the original iPhone. You have an iPhone 3G. You need this one.”

He’s right, of course. I switch protectors with the one he hands me. He then leads me over to Angelina (license again), who has more visible piercings than I have teeth. You don’t notice them so much on account of the neck tattoo.

Angelina takes my credit card and quickly rings me up on her little handheld device. She asks me if I had found everything I needed, and I confirm that I did. She makes pleasant chitchat, which I have trouble following because of all the body-modification stuff.

“Do you want help putting that on?” she asks, pointing to the screen protector. Now if you’ve ever tried to put an adhesive sheet of plastic onto a piece of glass, it’s tricky. If you stick it too early, you end up misaligned and, well, stuck.

“Sure.”

Angelina calls over Pam, telling me that Pam’s the best screen-protector sticker-onner. She also has fewer piercings.

Pam brings me over to another table. She takes my iPhone and gently and carefully cleans the glass face. Then, with the movements of a nimble surgeon (license, or just plain-old hyperbole), she peels the backing off the protector and lines it up, lowering it to about a millimeter above the glass. Then — and this is the cool part — she just drops it that last millimeter. The protector floats down and lands evenly on the screen. Pam then takes a card and squeegees the protector so that no bubbles can form. And that’s it. My screen protector is perfectly installed, my receipt’s being emailed to me, and the whole process took about six minutes. I return to my family just in time to sit down and order dinner.

So to recap: three Apple Store team members waited on me, all working together to make the smallest posible Apple Store sale. No one cross-sold me anything. I didn’t get snookered into a new Apple Cinema Display or a new MacBook Air. Three employees: $14.95 in sales revenue.

Now what if the Apple Store was run like a law firm? What if the Apple Store billed by the hour?

First of all, Anil, Angelina, and Pam would all use timesheets to keep track of the work they do each day. They would be required to divide up and account for their time in tenth-of-an-hour increments. I only spent about six minutes in the store, but each one of them would have to put down his or her interaction with me. Since six minutes is the smallest amount possible, each would record a “0.1” on that day’s timesheet.

Anil would write, “Conference with client in regards to optimal protection for said client’s iPhone 3G screen, to wit: a screen protector. Referral to Angelina for point-of-sale transaction … 0.1 hours.”

Angelina: “Conference with client in regards to point-of-sale transaction for one (1) screen protector for said client’s iPhone 3G (three G). Discussion in regards to additional products needed for purchase. Referral to Pam for screen-protector installation … 0.1 hours.”

And Pam: “Conference with client in regards to installation of iPhone screen protector. Cleaning and maintenance of said client’s said iPhone screen. Further conference with client in regards to having a nice evening … 0.1 hours.”

But in reality, law-firm clients resist double (or triple) billing by multiple lawyers. So firms often have to write down the time of other lawyers. In this scenario, two of the Apple team members would have had their time cut. Since only Angelina actually generated revenue (by swiping my credit card), Anil and Pam’s time would have been cut. This is ironic, since Anil (by helping me get the right protector) and Pam (by affixing it) gave me the most value.

Of course, law firms want their associates to bill as much time as possible, and they discourage nonbillable time. So if the Apple Store were run like a law firm, Anil and Pam would have been discouraged from such “nonbillable” work as helping me choose or affix an inexpensive screen protector, in favor of “billable” work like selling a new Mac Pro. If the Apple Store employees focused on selling billable hours, they wouldn’t be wasting time helping customers with little things like this.

But then again, if that had been the case, maybe I wouldn’t have returned to an Apple Store a few weeks later to buy the $2,500 MacBook Air that I’m writing this post on.

In law firms where lawyers are measured by the hours they bill, they are effectively punished for nonbillable time spent helping clients. Which is why people love going to the Apple Store, and hate dealing with lawyers.

• • •

A coda to this story: This afternoon, after this post was mostly written, I went to the Chestnut Hill (Mass.) Apple Store to buy a conversion cord (USB to Ethernet) for the aforementioned MacBook Air. Anthony Radzicki, an Apple Store “business partner,” greeted me and offered to get the cable. In chatting with him, I happened to mention that I bought my Air about three weeks before last week’s Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. At the WWDC, to my chagrin, Apple had announced a $800 price cut on the Air I had just bought. My purchase was a few days too early to qualify for the discount.

“Let me see what I can do,” Anthony said.

And here I was just making small talk. I had resigned myself to unlucky bad timing; I hadn’t been asking for an exception.

A short while later, Anthony had rerun my MacBook Air purchase with the $800 discount. Wow. All I can say is “wow.”

Here’s a guy who’s worked there for three years, loves his job, and excels at helping people. To be sure, his help took $600 out of Apple’s sales revenue today (I bought a few more things I wouldn’t have bought). But the bottom line is that I spend thousands of dollars with Apple each year. (Our whole law firm is on Macs and iPhones.) In the long run, Anthony’s help will encourage me to spend thousands more in the future.

If Anthony billed by the hour, this never would have happened.