Brand Spanking News

This morning, I took one of my employees to The Apple Store to purchase the new iPhone 3G. We've been rather swamped lately, he's put in more than his share of extra time and he really wanted one, so I thought this would be a nice thank you.

We arrived at the store at 7:50 am. There were probably 200 people in front of us in line, much like you would see at the airport during a rolling blackout, waiting to spend the equivilent of a round trip airfare for a mobile phone. People all around the world were buying new iPhones, causing the retail POS system, the iTunes Store and AT&T's servers to go to error frequently. It took us the better part of four hours to get our phones. But unlike at the airport, everyone kept smiling and stress was kept to a minimum.
Why did we consumers keep our cool? When flights start to get cancelled, travellers panic. There are not enough airline employees to rebook passengers and keep everyone calm, too.

In contrast there were ten or fifteen Apple Store employees outside the store mingling in the crowd, passing out free bottles of water. At about 10 am, they brought us Starbucks coffee. They offered to answer our questions and were generally nice to have around. When we got into the store, even though the systems were failing, the Apple employees were rallying.
It seems to me the airlines could re-learn something from Apple.