Apple's Delaware Store Claims Title for Selling Most iPhones - East Idaho News
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Apple’s Delaware Store Claims Title for Selling Most iPhones

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GETTY 111213 AppleStore?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1384268083988myLoupe/Universal Images Group via Getty Images(CHRISTIANA, Del.) — Sales clerks at an Apple store in Delaware proudly tell customers what Apple headquarters seems intent on keeping secret. The store sells more iPhones than any store in the country.

The store is located in the Christiana Mall, about halfway between Newark and Wilmington in the northern part of the state.

The enormous mall attracts buses of shoppers from across the line in New Jersey to the north and Maryland to the west as well as from further away like New York and Pennsylvania. The attraction is Delaware’s lack of a sales tax.

The result: “We sell more iPhones than anyone,” a clerk said proudly this past weekend.

Apple refuses to confirm which of its stores is the top seller. An Apple spokesperson tells ABC News that the company does not release sales information beyond the disclosures made in its financial reports, which do not break out performance numbers for specific stores.

But sales staff at the Christiana Mall store are quick to brag.

“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,” a Christiana clerk told ABC News.

The salesman echoed what ABC News was told on a visit a few weeks earlier and both salespeople said they were told of their ranking by their store bosses. The names are being withheld because they are not authorized to speak for Apple.

One clerk told ABC News that the store and its lack of a sales tax is popular with people who buy dozens, sometimes hundreds of phones at a time and take them to foreign countries to resell them at a profit.

Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for NPD, a consumer marketing consultancy, says Apple stores in general have the highest gross sales per square foot of any in retailing — higher even than those of jewelry stores, including Tiffany’s.

The reasons why the store ranks among Apple’s top performers aren’t hard to see, said Mall general manager Steve Chambliss: This is Apple’s only store in Delaware, a state with no sales tax. The mall’s location on Interstate 95, which links the Northeast corridor, makes it easy for shoppers from three adjacent tax-charging states to flock here.

“We’re the key shopping destination between Baltimore and Philadelphia,” said Chambliss.  “We’ve got 6,500 parking spaces, and they’re always all full.”

So heavily-trafficked is the store that it is guarded by Delaware state troopers. There are at least two troopers at a time inside the store with as many as 10 at the store to rotate through shifts and provide for crowd control.

Sgt. Paul Shavack, a spokesman for the Delaware State Police, told ABC News the troopers are assigned to the store on a “special duty” basis, meaning their time is being paid for by Apple, not by Delaware taxpayers.

Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

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