Shop Different
When Steve Jobs hired Ron Johnson to create the Apple Store in 2000, conventional wisdom said that the internet would put stores out of business. By the time he left Apple in 2011, Johnson and his team had created the most respected and profitable retail stores in the world. And even then, skeptics were still predicting the death of physical retail.
In Shop Different, Johnson reveals how it happened: how he earned Jobs’s trust, how they developed a vision for a store that would win not by selling but by serving, and how he convinced Jobs that the store’s service philosophy should be rooted in something as intangible as love. Johnson then gives readers a new look at Apple’s ascent to the most valuable company in the world; offers an inspiring vision for a future in which retailers win on connection, service, and experience; and shares an honest look at what leads to success—and what can follow.
I enjoyed this interview that Jeff Benjamin and Fernando Silva did with Ron Johnson.
Previously:
- Five Decades of Thinking Different
- Apple: The First 50 Years (Forthcoming)
- Apple Retail Store Time Machine
- 20 Years of Apple Retail Stores
- Closing Microsoft Retail Stores
- How the Apple Store Lost Its Luster
- Apple Retail Employees Aggressively Pushing iPhone Upgrades
- Interview With Ron Johnson
- My Today at Apple Experience
- Apple Stores Suffer From Customer Complaints, Long Wait Time
- Angela Ahrendts’s Plan for Apple Retail
- The Genius Bar Idea
- Apple Retail Changes
- Apple Retail Store Changes
Update (2026-09-25): Ron Johnson:
I told Steve, we’re going to get these people who are really good at technology, but they love people and are [good at conversation]. […] And he said, they don’t exist. Everyone who knows technology is kind of geeky. Maybe you call it the geek bar. […] But then I’d seen Apple’s genius campaign, and I felt like if we called a Genius Bar, People would come out of the woodwork wanting that job. Because who wouldn’t want to be the smartest Apple person in every city?
[…]
I said, you know, if the Mac’s a success, it’ll be the center of your digital life. And he came into the executive team meeting the next Monday, and I’m not saying it was solely that conversation, he probably had a lot of conversations about similar things, but he got all excited and stood at the whiteboard and drew a picture.
[…]
After I heard that, that night I was thinking about it, I woke up and I thought, well, if Steve’s going to market the Mac as the digital hub, our store’s [need to do that]. Our store was like any retail store, it was is built around products. We had portables and desktops.
I told Steve, well, maybe we ought to organize a store on movies and music and photos and the things you do.
