I was talking to a techie at school today about the new Apple store opening up near where I live. She gave me the low-down on how Apple treats it's resellers, especially the smaller ones. It's not pretty. She also pointed out that there were several Mac-only resellers in the Denver area, including one really excellent one called Logical Choice.
Now I'm not a VAR and never have been but a couple things occurred to me:
- The advantage of Apple stores is that they expose the brand to people whom the reseller wouldn't ever see in the course of their business.
- Apple has a database of resellers available on their Web site that is horrible to navigate at present.
- The Apple stores use a snazzy OS X-driven Point-of-Sale system which could easily tie into their reseller database
- Apple doesn't appear to be that interested in the after-market stuff that resellers are quite good at.
Now...what if, with every purchase at the Apple store, the cashier enters the customer's ZIP code and on the bottom of their receipt appears the location of the two closest Apple resellers, with a brief note recommending them to the customer?
I mean, I may be full of crap here, but this doesn't sound like a terribly hard thing for Apple to implement and it would play to the respective strengths of each vendor. Apple pulls in the new customers, the customers get to know a local expert and the resellers don't get kicked in the *ss quite so much.
Whether Apple would do something like this is another story, but it sounds like a decent idea to me. (Remember, I don't know much about this stuff.)