The Elite Apple Corps

The Apple Store is of California and exactly like California: the sunshine is still plentiful and free, the guys are glinty and nerdy (and the cute chicks dig them), but forget about parking in California, and the beach is totally mobbed, and the minute you get there you say to yourself Why am I here again? Oh, right, because it's all so cool. You stagger away from the Apple Store the same way you leave California, a little too buzzed.

Time does funny things to trends, and to iconic mall stores. Once upon a time, people loved hanging out in the Sharper Image, which is now part of mall blight like the Spencer Gifts and the GNC.

Not 18 months ago, cultural essayists and architecture critics would wander into flagship Apple Stores around the world (SoHo! Fifth Avenue! Regent Street!) and go long and poetic about Apple's revolution in hipster elegance, the clean lines, the retail frontier. And indeed, these are beautiful places, pluralistic to the point that you can use their bathroom, and check your e-mail on their display Macs, and be among friends you always dreamed of having, somewhere. It was a glimpse at a world where everyone is smart, and agreeably diverse, and able to spend lots of money. Now you have to brace yourself to walk into the Apple Store. The question so recently was: What is the Apple Store doing to us, as a people?

Now the question is: What are we doing to it ?

Can you smother a store to death?

Smothering, yes. "It's sweaty now," a friend says, thinking about the Clarendon store.

There are 204 Apple Stores in five countries, the majority of them in the United States. (The newest, in New York's meatpacking district, was scheduled to open Friday, with the attendant customer-acolytes lined up hours beforehand.) Over the summer, 330,000 Mac computers were sold at Apple stores -- and Apple says more than half of them were sold to new converts, who'd owned PCs. Around 270,000 people paid for "one-to-one" privileges, which allows them to come in for some special, personal love from an Apple Store genius.

These are not, in the grand consumer electronics scheme, huge numbers. It only feels like everyone is at the Apple Store. That is the glorious idea behind it, to be essential but still rare, to be ubiquitous but unique.

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The specialists and geniuses are in their black Apple T-shirts, wearing name tags (Adam, Matt, Luis and the endless supply of Ryans, and an occasional Jen).

And talkingrillyfast. Rillyrlyfst. Allfthem. Glare-eyed, too happy with themselves, like Jesus people holding up one finger on 1970s street corners. They know you aren't One of Them, but they forgive you. Nothing expresses both virtue and contempt like forgiveness. That's life in church. They know what Steve Jobs wants of them, and they live to serve.

Alex Frankel, a 37-year-old writer from San Francisco, spent the last few years applying for and working at a variety of retail jobs to report what it's really like on that side of the register, and writing a just-released book, "Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee."