It doesn't really matter, though, because as the OP pointed out, Apple Stores are massively profitable. This is well known in retail circles.

Landlords fall all over themselves to get Apple Stores. Real estate developers will include Apple Stores, or Apple Store lookalikes in their renderings even before the buildings are built, just to get people interested in their projects.

Microsoft set up a lot of stores in the same malls as Apple Stores. This disparity in numbers has always been the case, no matter how good the MS experience has been as others have pointed out. Seems Apple learned their lessons from the first time the battled Microsoft. Consumers don't do as deep of a research as the tech crowd thinks.

Crowds may be anecdotal, but the crowds clearly do translate into revenue for Apple.

The link spells out revenue per square foot for Apple as $5546, vs an average of $325. Second and third places bring in $3721 and $2951 per square foot.

[0] https://chainstoreage.com/news/most-profitable-retailers-sal...

I think that every one of them becomes a customer, eventually. Many of them become evangelists, which can sometimes be even more valuable.

There were--cough--a number of teenagers hanging around like groupies. One of them--cough--may even have installed their heavily customized SuperStarTrek game, and had it become the store's favourite demo.