It’s funny to me how in my last weeks here I’ve just found out that the majority of the people living in my building are here from different countries taking English classes and my main goal is to be an English as a Foreign Language/Second Language teacher. Needless to say, once I found this out I’ve been introducing myself and meeting some of the most interesting and friendly people, which is making me increasingly more sad to leave! I’ve been looking for internships to possibly consider for next summer abroad, and after meeting a bunch of the international students I’ve been really drawn to Italy (who wouldn’t be?). So I may or may not be spending parts of my day endlessly searching for places I might want to live and work teaching English. This summer isn’t over yet, so I’ll just focus on the amazing city of New York, and fret about how I’ll get to Italy another day.
Anyways this week at work has mostly been product research, organizing Power Points, and continuing on retail tours. A favorite part of this internship so far for me has been the retail tours. I recently spent a day down in Soho exploring the new stores, and one of the most interesting stores I walked into was the Samsung experience store. They sell nothing in the store. It’s solely an experience — meaning you walk into the store, they hand you tons of free products, you design your own t shirts, mugs, etc, get free coffee and food, along with a bunch of other things (I ended up winning $15 to starbucks in a trivia game!). While this store was awesome, the general theme across the stores I visited recently has been more about creating a store experience rather then selling products. Increasingly consumers expect more out of stores when they can just buy whatever product they want online. It’s much more valuable for stores to invest in making consumers experiences, learn, and love their brand in a physical space or expand the services offered in store beyond just retail products. An example being when I went to the first physical store of Birchbox, primarily an online service that delivers makeup samples to your door, they not only offered their products but a beauty salon downstairs and makeup lessons. Across the varying stores I visited it was increasingly common to encounter things like this, and it’s interesting to see how physical retail stores are changing — and also incredibly fun to tour them! Overall it’s been a fun week, and I’m looking forward to giving a presentation about all of the stores I’ve toured to my boss and her co-workers.