Steve Jobs is quoted in Walter Isaacson’s biography, p.376, talking in 2010 about the Fifth Avenue Apple Store: “This store grosses more per square foot than any store in the world. It also grosses more in total – absolute dollars, not just per square foot – than any store in New York. That includes Saks and Bloomingdale’s.”
Corroboration for the first claim is not hard to find on the internet, but not the second. Issacson presents both without comment, surprisingly because it seems so impossible that the Fifth Avenue store grosses more than any store in New York.
It’s not a corroboration, but I found one article that says, “In 2009, a piece published by the New York Post revealed that the building’s former owner had promoted the venue to prospective purchasers as doing a staggering $440 million in annual sales. A more conservative estimate has been offered by Jeffrey Roseman, executive vice president of New York real-estate broker ‘Newmark Knight Frank Retail’, who suggested that Apple’s Fifth Avenue emporium probably boasts annual sales of more than $350 million, topping any of the chain’s other outlets.” So the question is, what is the annual sales at Macy’s Herald Square or Bloomingdales?
I typed-in “macy’s herald square annual gross” to Google within 12 hours of the OP and it brought up this thread sixth on its first page. And the first three are official Macy’s sites.The Google summary contains adequate snippets of the combined ideas of Dewey Finn’s and my posts and links directly to the OP. Amazing, and quite a difference from a couple years ago on the SDMB.
I haven’t yet found figures on gross annual sales at, say, Macy’s, but the Fifth Avenue Apple store is 10,000 square feet and annually grosses $35,000 per square foot, or $350 million, or the equivalent of selling a Mercedes C300 sedan per square foot, according to a Bloomburg webpage from 2009. If anything, it probably grosses more now.
Macy’s is 2.2 million square feet total, about half of which is sales space. Apple has the one spiral staircase while Macy’s has 43 of just the original wooden escalators, not to mention many more modern ones plus banks of elevators. Apple is crowded, but no more than Macy’s in the month before Christmas.
Anecdotally, at least, I’m skeptical the Apple store out-grosses every other store in New York, but reserve judgment until I run across reliable figures.
According to ReferenceUSA, the Macy’s at 151 W 34th St.*, NYC, did $486,000,000 in sales, presumably in 2011 (updated Feb. 2012). That’s probably not the most authoritative source of data, but it’s something to start with.
- I put it this way because I don’t know Herald Square from a hole in the ground**. But I’ve just checked Google Maps and it appears to be the same store.
** Too soon?
If Macy’s annual gross is that close to Apple’s Fifth Avenue store, then Steve Jobs’s quote, even if exaggerated, becomes understandable. In the year he made it, it may even have been true. I don’t understand, though, why his biographer would put the quote out there without comment. Some elaboration would seem desirable. Far less amazing claims in the book are examined from every angle, and there is a whole chapter about Steve’s so-called reality distortion field, his propensity to make claims that contradict obvious facts. So putting this statement out there with no comment must have been deliberate, but why?
The book is filled with amazing events and accomplishments but this one, to me, if true, would be unparalleled – this little five-year-old store in the basement of the GM Building with an extremely limited product line outselling the century-and-a-half-old “largest store in the world” with seven stories on an entire city block. And there is another Apple store less than a mile away at Broadway at Sixty-seventh.
Does the Macy’s flagship store sell more expensive goods than than other Macy’s stores? Because I’ve shopped in their large stores in San Francisco (not nearly the size of Herald’s Square, I’m sure, but it’s their premier location on the West Coast, right?), and the stock is decidedly middle-class. It ain’t Nordstom, and Nordstrom ain’t Barney’s. They have a lot of stuff, but if most of it’s that Alfani crap, they need to sell a few shirts to equal an iPod, a lot to equal an iPhone, and they’d need to empty a rack to pull in the loot from one Macbook Pro.