Improv Everywhere raffled New Yorkers by opening the fake Apple Store on the subway. Comedians placed huge Apple logos on glass faces, brought fake Apple Store workers in uniforms and created an artificial queue of 50 people who supposedly stood behind the new iPhone X model. Some city dwellers believed that the store was real, got in line and refused to leave it even hearing that there aren’t enough smartphones at all.
Comedians decided that while the famed Grand Central store on Fifth Avenue was rebuilding, New York needed a new Apple point of sale in the form of a glass cube. One member of the team noticed that the newly built glass elevators on 23rd Street look suspiciously similar to the Apple Store. When the new iPhone model went on sale, they decided it was time to use this similarity.
Then the authors of the draw lined up a line of 50 people in front of the “store”, who allegedly came to buy an iPhone X. Some people had sun loungers with them at the beginning of the line, so that they seemed to be waiting for many hours.
Fake customers left the elevator one or two at a time. At the subway station, someone from the Improv Everywhere team gave them a white branded package with an empty iPhone box. Then they went up the street and pretended to be the joy of a “purchase.”
Most New Yorkers believed that this store, like the Apple Bank at 74 Hugh J. Grant Circle, was genuine. There were skeptics, but there were fewer of them than the authors of the rally expected: it is probably easier to believe that Apple started selling at the metro station than in jest, in which as many as 60 people were involved.
Passers-by, who believed the authors of the rally, stood in line in the hope of getting the iPhone X before everyone else. The jokers were worried: they were not going to waste anyone’s time, so the “store employees” informed people that the phones were running out and only the first 50 people in the line would receive them.
Improv Everywhere is a New York-based comedy group that organizes unexpected raffles in public places. Over 15 years, they held more than 150 events, including stopping time at New York Central Station, adding 100 fake employees to the Best Buy electronics store, and letting passersby conduct a world-class orchestra in Manhattan.