Damn, the Genius Bar is a bona fide mall hotspot. People love Apple's sterile, glassy retail stores so much, the expensive gadget hubs boost sales at malls by 10 percent.
The Wall Street Journal talked to real estate experts about Apple's outsized influence on American shopping centers, and it's remarkable. In some malls in New England, that figure is closer to one third of mall sales. This means Apple's impact on most malls is far more similar to how a large department store increases traffic than a normal retailer. People drop more money in those sleek gadget cubes than they do at far larger and more expansive stores.
Apple is leveraging its success by negotiating dirt cheap rental fees in comparison to its sales. The high sales volume can end up spiking rentals for neighboring businesses, so much that other stores ask that Apple be excluded when property owners are calculating how much rental space is worth.
The crazy part is, Apple's stores aren't the company's largest source of revenue. All 450 worldwide stores only account for 12 percent of the tech giant's annual sales revenue. This is an extremely lucrative side hustle that makes J. Crew look like a preppy slacker. [Wall Street Journal]
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