Apple Stores outsold Microsoft Stores nearly 5 to 1 in Black Friday purchases

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX1eTBeWoyw

A quick side-by-side video MacWeekend.com shot early morning on Black Friday at Lone Tree’s Park Meadow Mall where both Apple and Microsoft have their respective retail stores shows one is packed and the other is not. Apple’s place is much smaller versus Microsoft’s so it feels busier, of course. And over at the Apple Store in the Mall of America in Minneapolis, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster and his crew counted heads at both Apple’s store and the Microsoft Store directly across the hall.

Although non-scientific, their comparison survey tells us that shoppers picked up nearly five times as many items per hour at the Apple store. We already knew the iPad dominated mobile shopping on Black Friday. And if you ask kids, Apple’s tablet is the #1 item on their holiday wish list. Looks like Apple’s gonna own Christmas this year…

Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Fortune points us to three key findings of Munster’s team:

• there was 47% less foot traffic at the Microsoft (MSFT) outlet than the Apple (AAPL) store
• shoppers bought 17.2 items per hour at the Apple Store and only 3.5 items per hour at the Microsoft Store (all but two of the Microsoft purchases were X-Box games)
• shoppers at the Apple Store bought an average of 11 iPads per hour

Unfortunately, Munster and his team during the two-hour window they spent monitoring the Microsoft store were unable to spot a single customer walking out with a Surface tablet.

Here are the numbers.

His chart above doesn’t include iPhone sales and Piper Jaffray notes sales of Macs and iPads were down from 2012 due to supply issues:

The positive take away was store traffic was up 31% y/y, likely driven by shoppers wanting to see the new iPad Mini. The negatives were that the most popular iPad Mini (16G) is in limited supply and Mac sales (~12% of revenue) continue to appear to be impacted by the iPad and a slowdown ahead of the new iMac.

That 17.2 items per hour at the Apple Store versus just 3.5 products per hour at the Microsoft Store certainly doesn’t bode well for the Windows maker’s attempts to position its Surface tablet, Windows Phone and Windows 8-driven products during the all-important holiday shopping frenzy.