Dear Friends,

Grace and I got to see one of the best basketball games ever last weekend when the Celtics beat the Heat in Miami on a dramatic last-second 3-pointer. After noticing our Celtics jerseys, the bartender at the restaurant where we went after the game bought us a drink, too!

Things are really coming together at the Key West store, and I am glad I have had the chance to help get the store established here. I can tell it is getting colder back home when Will sends me pictures of my snow-covered back yard from time to time.

The iPad mini with Retina display is starting to ship, although we have not seen any inventory yet. We feel this will be a highly constrained product throughout the holidays, and our Product Management team is doing their best to get stock for all the stores. We are in a better position with regard to the iPad Air, which is in stock in many configurations at each of our stores.

One interesting thing we have discovered is that the White/Silver iPad Airs outsell the Space Gray model here in Key West by 3 to 1, but that is not true elsewhere. Nevertheless, the iPad Air has been a huge success; people are impressed by the speed, and love the smaller size that just seems to fit right in your hand. It is one of those products that sells itself. If you haven’t seen one yet, stop in at any of our stores to check it out!

This is a bit of a mini-soapbox but I’ll leave it in the opening. We were notified by the Mall in NH that the mall was going to be open at 8PM on Thanksgiving Day, and stay open until 10PM on Black Friday. I think this notion of pushing the shopping frenzy of Black Friday into Thanksgiving is ridiculous. While I will probably get in some trouble from the Mall, I refuse to open on Thanksgiving; my employees deserve to enjoy the day off with family just like anyone else.

We will, however, open a bit early on Friday and will have some great specials for our customers, even though they might have to wait 12 hours or so versus the other stores in the mall. We will be doing some really special things this year with Black Friday including an expansion of our Charitable Giving program that we will let you know more about soon!