Apple has 5th Avenue’s largest gross sales
If you have ever been on New York’s Fifth Avenue, you know why retailing all stars call it home. Now, as it turns out, Apple may actually be the the highest grossing retail store in that lineup.
In the midst (or perhaps the end) of a world wide recession that has hit the United States in a very real and depressing way, Apple has been enjoying boom times with most of its product lines. The iPhone is setting new sales records with every quarter. Sales of Mac computers have held their own all through these harsh economic times. Overall, revenue is up for the Cupertino electronics giant, a distinctly different story than for their competition. And, unlike most companies during this bad patch, Apple’s stock share price has risen steadily during the recession.
Now, it turns out that there is another bright star in Apple’s sky. They are now thought to be the largest grossing retail store on even the priciest stretch of Fifth Avenue. Bloomberg reports that retail sales in New York City have fallen between 8 percent and 10 percent from the same periods in 2008, according to the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book business survey just published. Over that same time period, Apple’s retail revenues have increased 2.5 percent. It is as if the economy has simply had no impact on Apple.
Patricia Edwards, a retail analyst and founder of Storehouse Partners LLC in the Seattle area, said in a recent report, “Even if they are not spending money elsewhere, people are still spending money on technology gadgets. It’s both a need and a want. It fulfills that retail-therapy component.”
And those gadgets do not come cheap. When you consider that just one iPhone can sell for $299, with extra costs for most related gadgets, and that it is not to hard to spend up to $5,000 on a Mac computer, it’s easy to see that the average sale at an Apple retail store is fairly high. And given the volume of customers at the Apple store on Fifth Avenue in New York, it’s easy to see how a combination of things could give Apple the largest gross sales on the street.
Sales of $350 million per year, as one analyst said, is the equivalent of selling a Mercedes Benz annually for every square foot of floor space in their Fifth Avenue store, which is not even the leading revenue maker in the chain. Even in a recession people still want their gadgetry. It is easy to see that when they are spending that much money during a recession, they want to get their money’s worth, and Apple is perceived by many to represent the best. Apple has found yet another way to buck industry trends.
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