MacMall announced on Thursday the grand opening for a new brick and mortar retail store the company is launching in Huntington Beach, CA. The store will open up on Saturday, December 10th, and MacMall is offering discounts on several Macs and accessories for the event.
The company is also holding a drawing for the first 300 people who show up. The drawing will include more than US$3,500 in prizes, including a MacBook Air, three iPod touch players, five iPod nanos, and five Apple TVs.
MacMall will be most well known to Mac users as a mail-order catalog company, part of the larger PC Mall corporation. For many long years before Apple went into the retail business, MacMall and other companies like MacWarehouse (now owned by CDW) and ClubMac (now owned by MacMall) were the only way for many peope in the U.S. to shop for Macs, and their catalogs were one of the few items of junk mail we would look forward to getting in our mail boxes.
Page after page of Macs—and if you were a Mac user at the time, you know what we’re describing—and for a few short years, Mac clones and bundle deals (usually involving a printer or Bungie’s Marathon franchise): this is what Mac users had to look forward to every month or so. Those catalogs offered Mac fans a taste of the Mac wonderland we all take for granted today because of Apple’s fleet of retail stores.
What is less well known is that this is actually the third brick and mortar retail store MacMall has opened, and that these stores are recent additions to the company. The company’s flasgship store is in Torrence, CA, and MacMall told The Mac Observer that this location is also used as a test store, and there’s another location in Santa Monica. A fourth store is currently planned for Chicago.
What may also be surprising to long-time Apple watchers is that Apple is supportive of the endeavor, despite the fact that it puts MacMall in more direct competition with Apple’s own Apple Store retail locations. Dan DeVries, President of MacMall, told TMO that, “Apple’s encouraging us to do this.”
The new MacMall store is located at 16929 Beach Blvd., Huntington Beach, CA, and the grand opening starts at 9:00 AM PST, with a ribbon cutting ceremony and the MacBook Air drawing being held starting at 10:00 AM.
Grand Opening discounts include $60 off a 13” MacBook Pro, $100 off a 27” iMac, $30 off a Mac mini,$78 off a 21.5” iMac, $89 off a 15” MacBook Pro, and discounts on several peripherals. These are all deal similar in scope to those offered by Apple on Black Friday.