The Elite Apple Corps

He delivered packages for UPS. He barista'd at a Starbucks. He entered the bizarre culture of Enterprise Rent-a-Car. He folded shirts at the Gap.

At the end of "Punching In," Frankel at last alights on retail nirvana: the Apple Store.

"Of all the places I worked, it was the place where I was most able to be myself," he says, by phone from his home out there in the golden land. "It sounds kind of cheesy, but it was just a whole lot more easy to be there and deal with the whole art of selling, because you don't have to fake it."

He already used and liked the product -- he's owned seven Apple computers in his time. The word on the street was that Apple Stores reject 90 percent of their applicants, boasting even that it's harder to get hired on at some stores than to get into Stanford. Frankel, who'd failed to out-psych the hiring process at Home Depot and Whole Foods, sailed right into Apple, working for a month or so as an $11.25-an-hour Mac specialist in the Apple Store at Stonestown Galleria, a smallish Nordstrom-and-Macy's mall in San Francisco.

What separates an Apple Store dude (Frankel observes that the employees are still mostly male) from other stores' employees is the degree to which he believes fully in the product and the mission. "Here, unlike Gap, CEO Steve Jobs could not slip in unannounced -- he was revered as godlike," Frankel writes. He learned to fine-tune the store's casual, companionable sales techniques, the three P's, as laid out in the training video: "Position, permission, probe." ( Position: Let the customer know that you're asking questions to get a feel for what they want to use the computer for, and they give permission, and then you really probe, find out if they do graphics, if they want to make movies, if they're going to go way, way into the iLife.)

"If Gap was hot in the 1980s and Urban Outfitters in the 1990s, this was the time for the Apple Store chain," he writes. In his epilogue, Frankel returns to the Apple Store with a problem concerning a gift certificate. A store employee "adamantly declared that I could purchase something only online and absolutely not in the store." And Frankel recognized him. He'd folded shirts with him at the Gap.

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"I think people are still not exactly sure what the Apple Store is all about," says Gary Allen, a former police dispatcher in Berkeley, Calif., who in his spare time runs a Web site called ifoAppleStore, which obsessively chronicles and documents any and all news about store locations, since Apple officially declines to discuss or reveal its plans. (Allen has become adroit at sniffing out new Apple Stores by checking building permits. Also you can sense its arrival by habitat: upscale stores, hip streets and, weirdly, the J. Jill clothing chain. Apple likes to be on the Nordstrom end of malls. These are some good indicators.)

"People are used to a big box store, where you go and you pull things off the shelf and you take them to a cash register. The first time you go into an Apple Store is a little like going into a restaurant where you don't know if you order at the front or at your table, and where you pick up your food," Allen says. "Up until a year or so ago, [the store] had a policy where people would come in and you don't bother them. Now you walk in and they immediately say, 'Hi, can I help you with a computer today?' "

More strangers kept coming in, and Apple had to retrain the church ushers. Then more people kept coming. Soon enough, the activity level in your average Apple Store began to feel like a Saturday afternoon at Best Buy.

"I was in the flagship store on Regent Street in London recently," says Michael Oh, president and founder of Tech Superpowers, on Boston's tony Newbury Street. "And it was absolutely insane, like at the level of the Underground at rush hour. People were five deep in front of computers. You could not walk a straight line to the back of the store."

For years, Tech Superpowers has sold and catered to upscale Mac users. Now, just across their alley on Boylston Street, there is a huge Apple Store going up. It's unclear how it will affect Oh's business, and yet, as a true believer in the product, he is giddy nonetheless to see it. They are building high-end condos over there, and a Mandarin hotel. It's very Apple Store. He set up a webcam to chronicle the construction.