What do you get if you take one tiny state with no sales tax, one part proximity to some of the highest population density in the U.S., and stir in the most popular smartphone on the planet? You get the Apple Store retail location that sells more iPhones than any other, and ABC figured that out.
The retail location in question is the Apple Store in the Christiana Mall, in Newark, Delaware. As noted above, Delaware has no state sales tax, making the Christiana Mall destination shopping, especially for residents of sales-tax heavy New York (especially New York City), New Jersey, Maryland, and, according to ABC, Pennsylvania.
Apple Store Christiana Mall
Source: Apple
Apple doesn't announce sales for individual retail stores, but ABC found two people that work at that location who said management had told staff their status as the top iPhone selling location.
“We sell more iPhones than anyone,” one employee said, while another said, “The only store that does more volume is the glass box on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue and that is open 24 hours a day. But no one sells more phones than we do.”
So who cares, right? One store has to sell more iPhones than all the others, just as one store has to sell more external hard drives than all the others (etc.). What I found interesting about this story was the description of chartered busses “with New York license plates” that pull up and disgorge dozens of customers to go into this store to buy iPhones.
Many of those folks buy tens—or even hundreds—at a time, in order to take them overseas to sell on the gray market. For these folks in particular, saving 8, 9, or 10 percent by not paying sales tax adds significantly to the gray market bottom line.
This particular Apple Store is so busy, Apple hires not just police, but off-duty Delaware State Troopers as a public face to the store's security. There are a minimum of two on staff at any given time, with as many as four to ten rotating through the day, depending on customer levels.
Only Apple can generate this kind of consumer intensity, and only Apple warrants the time and attention from a national, mainstream news organization to ferret out this kind of information. It's fascinating.