Nobody Waits In Line For The Verizon iPhone At The Mall Of America Apple Store

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Everybody knows how awful AT&T is – right? So you’d expect the Apple Store located in America’s largest mall to be extremely busy on the day that the Verizon iPhone goes on sale? Not so much. In a somewhat embarrassing video for Apple and Verizon, it shows the Mall of America Apple Store in Minnesota completely staffed up with what must be 20 employees, only to have two people waiting to get in. Where’s everybody else?

I’ll embed the video below, but the gist of it is this: The Apple employees open up the doors to the Apple Store. All the employees clap, like they do at all these Apple launch events (and as a non-Apple fanatic, it’s fairly obnoxious, but I digress), and then the two women sitting outside the store casually get up and walk in. No rush, no line, no camping tents. Mall of America is America’s largest mall with some 500 stores. Minneapolis has a population of 3.2 million. With numbers like that, you’d expect a big crowd and there wasn’t any.

So, is the Verizon iPhone a flop? No, not exactly. Existing Verizon customers have been able to pre-order the phone and many of them already have it. And although everybody has been predicting a mass exodus on February 10th of people flocking from AT&T to Verizon, that’s just not realistic. People are locked into contracts on AT&T and won’t want to pay the early termination fees. They may be on a family plan and can’t move the whole family over. They may be on a business plan through work. There are plenty of reasons we won’t see this massive biblical jump from AT&T to Verizon.

Maybe you’d see a bigger reaction in cities like San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles – where the iPhone is basically a paperweight on AT&T’s network. But, in the rest of America, it’d be foolish to jump on the iPhone 4 now on Verizon. A new one will come out in 4 months, and at the end of the day, you’d be paying $200 for a phone you already bought on AT&T. Let’s wait 12 months from now – and see how many people have gone from AT&T to Verizon.