Sales Fails will take a look back at some of the stupid ill-fated techniques Apple adopted in order to get customers out the door with a product, and today is the turn of the 2 minute ride. You see, before the iPhone, the store was actually a good place to shop. There was no over-crowding, no dumb fucking Specialists and absolutely no box-pushing. So much so some customers would be really surprised when you'd talk them down from a MacBook Pro to an entry level MacBook, and you could pretty much spend as long as you needed without rushing or being forced to sell them a product they didn't need and would never use.
Maybe the 2 minute was the beginning of the end. We were told that you could now demo all the features of a Mac in 2 minutes, then move on. You had to open PhotoBooth, take a picture and drag it into Mail and Word. It never worked because, in our store at the time, there were no other customers to move along too. Specialists were confused after being told 'spend as long as the customer needs' to 'just give them 2 minutes'. Now you'll probably be lucky to get even a minute with someone that doesn't have a trendy haircut and knows what an eMac is.
