First visit. Not up to the standards of the other ...

First visit. Not up to the standards of the other Apple stores I've been to, i.e., Fifth Avenue, Madison at 75th, and Grand Central. Firstly, I almost walked right by it, since the Apple logo is black, high up, and doesn't announce its presence at all. The meek demeanor continued inside, where at 11am in Soho the store was practically empty, which was encouraging since I wanted a quick "in and out," buying some replacement earphones--which I thought would take less than 5 minutes by the look of the store traffic. But, no---first of all, it seems the earbuds are behind a cordoned-off section which had no salesperson in it, so I had to wait a while for one to show up. There was one other person waiting when I got there, so the salesperson was fetching something for him it seems, because when he got back it was another 10 minutes of waiting while they did some high-finance transaction (the wait was sort of like being in a bank line, waiting for the teller to explain to the customer why their check can't clear the same day). Well, when the transaction was completed, I figured I was next--but no! Lo and behold, another customer magically appeared behind me, and the salesperson said, "Oh, he was here before you." (Which was weird, since same said salesperson had just acknowledged me, and had said, firstly, "I'll be right with you.") By the time I finally did my 2-second transaction of saying, "I want to buy a pair of earphones for this iPhone," and zipped my card through their zippy portable device----the line behind me was snaking halfway to the door (see pic). Seems this one hapless salesperson was also somehow in charge of returns. You know, upon reflection, I really don't think it WAS an Apple store. I've never had such a slow, un-Apple experience in one. Took me about 20 minutes to make a simple transaction. Usually in an Apple store there are 10 salespeople to every customer (or so it seems.)