“Classy” Apple Store Black Friday report

I just received the following rave from a loyal reader.

I read the Apple Black Friday ad early on Black Friday morning and saw that several things I’d purchased during the last month were reduced in price, some considerably. Darn! But they also had Photoshop Elements 8 at a great price, so my husband and I decided to try to get a copy. Because we had other things to do, it was rather late when we got to the Apple Store, around 2 p.m.; surprisingly, there were still two copies of Elements left. After we send in the coupon for the manufacturer’s rebate, we will pay only $48, less than half price and the best price I found on the web. My last Elements was version 2. Tut tut! Maybe this time I’ll actually learn how to use it.

While at the store, I decided to ask whether they could do anything for us about the prices we’d paid for all the items we bought in the last month that were now on sale. Our sales associate said no, because I was two days beyond the return date. “Oh, darn!” I said. “I bought so much from you,” and proceeded to list all the items–a MacBook, the extended warranty, One-to-One, Snow Leopard (for an older MacBook and a Mac Mini), iWork, Office for the Mac (because the formatting changes when I edit my colleagues’ documents using iWork), the new Magic mouse, and a cable for my Cinema display. Then the sales person who is primarily a One-to-One consultant (every staff member was on the floor for the big Black Friday sale), said he would go and ask his manager if anything could be done.

Well, the manager listened to my long list and then agreed to give us refunds for all the items we’d bought that were now on sale. Possibly he did it because I didn’t push too hard and wasn’t obnoxious. We ended up getting $86.95 back, which was terrific, more than enough to pay for the Photoshop Elements.

The MacBook I’d just bought was not on sale, but the low end MacBook Pro was reduced by $101 to within $100 of what I paid for my MacBook. I knew there was no point asking for any credit on that. Had I been able to buy the Pro for just $100 more, I would have done so, but that’s life. By the way, I arranged for all the rebates by pulling up the receipts on my iPhone. Fun! I’m old enough to really get a kick out of what one can accomplish with the new technology.

Of course, students or academics would have gotten more than $86.95 back on my total purchase and, in my opinion, giving me the refund was smart marketing for Apple but, still, I think all the Apple people are so classy! I wonder if many other people tried to do what I did. Probably, throughout the US, a few people did, but it did not seem as though anyone else had tried in Tucson. I guess those who had bought recently either said, “Oh phooey!” as I did at first, or they didn’t bother to check the ad because they’d already bought what they wanted. As for me, I’m an Apple customer and promoter for life.