| Monday, December 27, 2004 |
13:42 - An embarrassment of iPods
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I was just in the Valley Fair mall returning something; and I stopped in at the Apple Store to observe the post-holiday crush, which (the red-shirted employees assured me) was as light as it's been all day. It was a madhouse.
All hands were on deck, handling both new purchases (from gift cards) and, more notably, returns. In the ten-deep line at the five-abreast checkout counter, I saw that most people were carrying an iPod box—in some cases, two. The likeliest scenario, then, is that tons and tons of people got iPods from more than one person. There's no use for two iPods, let alone three.
Here's the interesting thing, though. The iPod is priced just right in order to be a very special gift in a middle-class family. We're talking a $300-600 price point here: the kind of thing you'd give as a graduation present, a wedding gift, or a milestone birthday. Here it is being bought by the truckload for Christmas... often by more than one member of the same family, not knowing of other members' plans. The iPod is just too perfect, too obvious a gift idea. And doesn't it say something about our economy that so many families are not only willing, but able to support buying multiple iPods for the same person for Christmas?
Surely this isn't the best news for Apple; I'm sure they must have looked at their pre-Christmas iPod sales numbers and muttered "This is too good to be true". And so it was. But it's not every day you get a neat statistical outlier like this, a real economic phenomenon, unfolding right in front of us.
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Brian Tiemann
