Yes, and then too sometimes you order for same-day delivery and the store hands the bag to an Uber Eats driver (they actually do partner with Uber Eats for courier service!) who mysteriously never turns up to hand it off to you. Then you have to spend a few hours on the phone with Apple to make sure you don't end up paying for a phone you never got.

I don't blame the guy who stole it, although I might if I'd had to hold the bill for his act of sticky-fingered entrepreneurship. I do blame Apple for using a service, whose drivers normally handle $50 in food at a time, to deliver nonperishable and highly portable items of 20 or more times that value.

I'm not sure I agree with "universally", I bet there are a awful lot of people who can't stand that level of service and find it quite uncomfortable. I get that I could order ahead etc, but that makes an impulse purchase into a multi-step process. I'm sure the multi-trillion dollar company felt that pain when I still bought their product only from a different place. Oh wait... ;-)

Except when you don't want the high-touch service. Good service companies recognize this and have some accommodation for the customer who knows what they want and are there to buy, not shop.

If I'm there to shop, I'll ask them to point me to what I want to try out and do so. If I'm buying clothes, for example, high-touch is great. "I like this style, but this manufacturer doesn't fit me well, do you have something similar you recommend?"

But when I needed a new Apple Watch charger on a trip, I walked into the store, said I needed one, and the only question was did I want USB-A or USB-C? A, thanks, sold. I was in and out in less time than it took my wife to find and use the restroom in the mall.

One bizarre experience I had was when I had a Genius Bar appointment to fix an inaudible handset speaker on an iPhone (apparently they have a program that runs through a wide gamut of frequencies to knock out any odd bits of dust). Yep, it worked. Then the Genius asked me if I would make a phone call (can't, it's a backup phone, no SIM) or FaceTime call (um, to whom?) to test it. It's work hours, the people I would call would be busy at work, how about I just call your phone? No, can't share that.

I said, Genius, why don't you have a generic thing that I can FaceTime and you can respond to that's part of your work identity? I don't need your personal info. Just "applestore-ZIPcode-[five-digit one-time account]@icloud.com" would work.