Ted Landau offers an article from a US perspective on what it was like before there were Apple Stores:

[Y]our first problem would be finding a retail store that sold Macs. Apple’s fortunes had fallen so low that most people assumed the company would be bankrupt before the millennium arrived. Even the arrival of the iMac in 1998 did not do much to reverse that belief. As such, many retail chains treated Apple products as if the sales staff could get leprosy by touching them.

I can recall my own dismal experience. I walked into the store and was immediately greeted by a dizzying array of computers and peripherals. Only one problem. Everything was Windows-related. Not one Mac or any other Apple product was visible. When I asked a salesperson about Macs, I was directed to the rear corner of the store — back near where they kept empty cartons and other related trash. Here I found a few Macs (never the complete line of products) sitting around in a disordered and unappealing display.

As for the […] salespeople, they varied from Mac-ignorant to Mac-hostile, often both. On several occasions, when I asked a question, the salesperson pretended to know what he was talking about and confidently gave me the entirely wrong answer. Not surprisingly, these same sleazeballs typically tried to steer me away from Macs altogether, suggesting that Apple was only for losers. “If I went with Windows, I could get a better machine, with more third-party software, for less money.”

All this was true in the UK, too, only here you’d pay roughly twice what Americans got charged for the same hardware. I remember the odd PC World selling Macs, but they were inevitably turned off, and customers were hurried away from them by sales staff who said you “can’t run Word on a Mac” and that “Macs might well come to life at night and eat your first-born,” or some other bollocks.

Today, things are much brighter, and I put much of Apple’s resurgence down to these stores. It’s one thing to think you might like a product, but I’ll bet Apple today sells far more kit through people experiencing it first-hand—even if only for a few minutes in one of its stores—than it would if it had it remained an online-only operation. Additionally, it’s clear Apple’s high-street success has increased support elsewhere, too. In the UK, there are more resellers of Macs than I’ve ever known, even including the likes of Argos.

I’ll also add one further comment: on experiencing Apple Stores of all sizes, from the gargantuan and beautiful Covent Garden store, to smaller efforts in the likes of Southampton and Tampa, one thought often crosses my mind: why aren’t more stores this well designed, laid out and accessible?