Beyond its big presence in Best Buy stores across the country, Samsung also has a few showrooms of its own scattered about. One such location was visited recently by Kontra, an anonymous “veteran design and management surgeon” who is well-known by Apple bloggers and enthusiasts. Kontra has been sharing his smart and snarky takes on Apple and its competition for quite some time now, and his most recent escapade took him to a Samsung Galaxy store in New York. As you can imagine, he had some thoughts to share regarding his experience there.
“One step into the store, there is an extremely awkward concrete step with yellow-black warning stripes for a grand entrance,” Kontra noted in a post on his blog. “This would have never happened if Steve Jobs were alive or Judge Judy Koh wasn’t on vacation.”
He shared 14 thoughts about the Samsung Galaxy store on his blog, some of which are merely quips and some of which offer interesting insights. Kontra said that the crowd in the store was a fraction of what one might find in an Apple Store at any given time, and he says the location would be “an ideal venue for students of store design and merchandizing to study (and compare to Apple Stores) matters of attention to detail, purpose, focus, traffic management, customer care and, dare I say, profitability.”
Why profitability? As Kontra noted, Samsung doesn’t actually sell any merchandise in the store.
He continued, “As you’d expect, the whole Samsung Galaxy experience is gamified. You get a check-in card (see above), NFC-activated on the spot via a Galaxy phablet, to harvest your contact info. If you get enough points (by familiarizing yourself with various store sections) you get freebies like food, t-shirts and ‘a chance to win Samsung products.'”
“The unsurprising thing about the store was that I encountered absolutely nothing that failed to unsurprise me,” Kontra concluded, joking that perhaps he should return to the Samsung store every day, as his check-in card suggests, in order to better understand its purpose.
