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HISTORY MEETS TECHNOLOGY: APPLE & ZABAR'S SQUARE OFF ON BROADWAY
Zabar’s has been the deli of record on New York’s Upper West Side for 75 years, and no one has surpassed its service, experience and quality gourmet food. Zabar’s feels confident enough about its unique offering to dub itself no less than a “gourmet epicurean emporium” on its Facebook and Twitter pages.
Generations of food aficionados have craved Zabar’s mouthwatering hand-cut smoked salmon slices, the baguettes and vast array of cheeses you can’t live without. It’s style as a store: an urban bazaar with stuff hanging everywhere, products piled up to the ceiling and sensory overload at every step. Zabar’s dominates upper Broadway’s quaint community as a signature store that grounds you in the good life of years past still available today. Zabar’s is the place.
But a few blocks south and just a Camembert’s throw away, a newcomer has shown its shining armor. Apple has settled its pure and transparent glass house, a Philip Johnson-inspired glass gem of sleek design in the midst of the Upper West Side’s cozy, antiquated mom-and-pop boutiques.
While Zabar’s engages all your senses, Apple augments your reality. One helps you connect with the past, the other the future. One is vision, the other is dijon. It’s a story of bandwidth vs. gefilte fish, high tech vs. high touch, image vs. fromage.
You might think that the new will eventually supplant the old and that the neighborhood’s changing face will wreck the values of the seminal, almost century-old family institution. Will Apple’s innovative retail approach destroy Zabar’s old shoe tradition? Is there any progress unless the new destroys the old?
Not at all. For all their differences, Macs meeting old-fashioned bagels are more complimentary than one would think. Zabar’s will sharpen your knives, while Apple will keep you on the cutting edge of technology. Zabar’s makes the bread warm and crusty while Apple makes hot products for the upper crust. Zabar’s is about the old school of two-for-one offerings while Apple is about a million offerings in one.
In other words, both Zabaristas and Applemaniacs discover in both stores the emotions and sensory experiences that are singular enough to be Tweetable to the world. So although Apple offers the world’s thinnest product and Zabar’s the world’s fattest, both are places to discover new sensations, places to enjoy the best of human ingenuity. Both brands are hard not to love. We can only hope that Zabar’s will always stay the same, changing only incrementally to keep us grounded in history, and that Apple will keep on letting us dream beyond the present.
Zabar’s caters to our craving for authenticity and tradition, while Apple supports our need to transcend our reality and see the future. These brands do more than complement each other, but also show us how incomplete our experience would be if either disappeared forever.
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