Patrick TrautfieldWith a swelling of commercial businesses taking root in town, San Luis Obispo will soon join the ranks of a growing number of cities worldwide to receive an Apple retail store.
Unlike the existing Apple retailers, such as the Mac Superstore located on South Higuera Street and El Corral Bookstore at Cal Poly, the new Apple retail store will be headed by Apple Computers Inc. – one of several hundred corporate chain stores to open up worldwide since 2001.
“We very much handpick our sites and we feel San Luis Obispo is perfect and ready for an Apple store,” said Apple representative and design manager Benjamin Fay during a public meeting at City Hall last July. “We are very enthusiastic about it.”
Approved by a 3-2 City Council vote on Jan. 9, Apple was awarded the permits to begin setting up shop in San Luis Obispo, but not without many months of negotiations with city officials.
Last summer, Apple had cast its ambitious eyes upon the city of San Luis Obispo with the intent to open a corporate retail store some time near the holidays.
The vacant retail space formerly occupied by Men’s Express at 877 Higuera St. on the corner of Morro Street was selected to become the host for the new Apple store.
The owners of the retail space, the Copeland family – who also own several retail spaces downtown, including the new Court Street shopping center – presented the designs for the new retail space, with representatives from Apple, to the San Luis Obispo Cultural Heritage Committee (CHC) late last July.
However, disputes with the CHC over Apple’s requested design changes stalled the development.
Plans presented by Apple called for the stripping away of the marble colonnade at the entrance of the location, the removal of the brick bulkhead to incorporate larger windows and the replacement of the windows facing Morro Street with Apple’s signature opaque “frosted” windows. These changes were met with much scrutiny by the CHC.
After several revisions were deferred to the Architectural Review Commission (ARC) by the CHC, Apple all but withdrew its plans and disappeared from city review until this January.
In a direct appeal to the City Council, Apple was finally awarded the permits to open a retail store in San Luis Obispo.
“They (Apple) appealed directly to us because the ARC would not approve their plans,” said San Luis Obispo City Councilmember Christine Mulholland. “Through the process of appeal, anybody can come up to us for a direct vote of approval regardless of what, say, the ARC, might have disapproved.”
Though it took several months longer than expected for Apple to receive the green light, it comes as no surprise to current local Apple retailers who have been wary of the arrival of an Apple store for some time.
“I knew it was coming,” said Preston Sirois, the computer division manager of El Corral Bookstore. “They might have fallen off the public radar here for a couple of months, but I was not surprised at all to hear that they would still pursue a store in town.”
It was a different story several months ago, when the news of a corporate Apple retailer came as quite a shock to Sirois and Shane Williams, the owner of the Mac Superstore, because neither could figure out why Apple had chosen a considerably small location such as San Luis Obispo.
What was even more frustrating for Sirois and Williams was the fact that Apple had in large part left them out of the loop.
“They didn’t really explain to us why they wanted to move into the area. It was just like one day they said, ‘Thanks for all the hard work, but we’ll take it from here,'” Williams said.
“I think we do a great job of marketing their (Apple) product on our own, so it really doesn’t make much sense for them to open up here,” Sirois said.
For Williams, the decision by Apple to open a corporate store is reflective of his annual profits and the accelerating trend of commercial businesses flooding into the area.
“Last year we made over $6 million in revenue so I think that played a hand in Apple’s decision to go corporate here,” Williams said. “Apple seems to think we’re a big town now because they look at the demographic and all the big stores coming in and they think that having another Apple store in town wouldn’t hurt us.”
Williams pointed out that the arrival of a corporate Apple store would be the first time that Apple has opened in a city of less than 100,000, making the San Luis Obispo store location the smallest per population (roughly 45,000).
For Sirois and Williams, having three Apple locations in such a small city would certainly have an adverse effect on their businesses.
“We’ll take a hit, but I am not too concerned about it because our markets are a bit different,” Sirois said. “We cater our Apple products to students and faculty only. You need a student ID to purchase, say, a Macbook from us, and we are not allowed to sell Apple hardware to the general public because we sell them at student discount price.”
For Williams, the opening of a third Apple retailer in San Luis Obispo is even more detrimental.
“They’re going to hammer us,” Williams said. “And not just because there will be a third store, but because the corporate retailer can market exclusive products that we’re not allowed to sell, such as the iPhone, and make special deals that we’re not allowed to make as well.”
If competition was fair, Williams said he wouldn’t mind the arrival of a third store as much, but both he and Sirois acknowledge that the corporate Apple store will have a competitive edge in products and certain services such as in-store product replacement for faulty purchases.
“It’s hard for us to be too critical of Apple because we are also marketers of their product. It puts us into a strange position trying to lash out against them when I’ve built my business standing by their products,” Williams said.
Regardless of what threat the arrival of the corporate store might pose to the Mac Superstore or El Corral Bookstore, both Sirois and Williams said that they can stay competitive by providing superior customer service on levels that a corporate Apple store is not readily capable of.
“We’re going to expand our customer service to include things like at-home service and installation of Apple products and introduce aftermarket products and accessories that the Apple store can’t carry,” Williams said. “It’s a start, but we have some major reworking to do if we’re going to have any longevity in this community.”
Some of the City Council members understand the competition that the arrival of Apple might bring to the current retailers, but said that it is not their responsibility to pick sides on this matter.
“We have no say on what businesses can or can’t come into town,” Mulholland said. “Our job is to make sure those contractors and companies who want to come into town strictly follow the zoning and building regulations.”
Apple Computers Inc. was not available for comment as to when it might open the store, but Councilmember Mulholland suspects that they will open sometime in the spring.
San Luis Obispo will become the 35th city in California to host an Apple retail store.