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Jorge Padilla
Jackie Hymes
ENGL 113A
10-10-15
Ethnography
I began my ethnography outside of the Apple store in a commonly known mall, the
Glendale Galleria. All things aside, at first this was all a very awkward experience since the
apple employees wouldnt allow me to talk to their customers. What I ended up doing instead
was wait outside to talk to their customers and when it came to the observing part it wasnt that
hard since apple has a tendency to build glass walls around their stores. I believe this apple
franchise was crowded, because of the attraction from the other stores. However, are all apple
stores as crowded as the one I was studying, this wouldve been a great research question that
now comes to mind for my ethnographys study agenda. My research began with calculating the
average population of apples customers. I didnt have a lot of time since I capped the case study
to an hour, but the way I approached this was to tally every male and female that entered the
store every five minutes. I also felt it was necessary to record the age of the groups of customers
whom entered the store within those five minutes. Since I couldnt ask every person I was
tallying down (because there were so many) for their age, what I did instead was estimate the age
of people that were entering and once the five minutes had passed I would label that groups age
by the majority of the customers who seemed to be that age. I made 3 age groups, old, middle
aged, and teens; young kids fell along with teens too.
After I averaged the total amount of people who entered this apple store which came out
to 113 people every five minutes; you must also take into consideration the day of the week, it

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was a Saturday so not many people were working. I then moved onto calculate the averages of
the men who entered the Apple store which had come out to 58 men every five minutes. You can
assume I conducted the same calculations for women; 55 women entered within the time span of
5 minutes. Now with what I knew after organizing my population data I came up with a
conclusion, not a definitive conclusion, about the reason why the numbers were steadily close to
each other. This was because a majority of the people who did enter apple were in a pairs,
couples as I had originally assumed but possibly opposite gendered friends, relatives, etc.
From here the second part to my ethnographys research agenda began, which was to
survey actual customers who had just finished shopping inside from the apple store. My
approach to this was to ask informative yet quick questions so that I wouldnt take up too much
of a persons time. The questions were as follows: Whats your ethnic background? Are you,
looking/browsing, repairing, or buying an IPhone product? Do you own an IPhone product and if
you do own an IPhone product, how long have you owned it for? Were you here specifically
because of the IPhone product or some other apple product? Could you briefly explain through
what source of media brought you to discover the IPhone? Would you say that your IPhone plays
a personal role in your life and how?
Now of the the 3 surveyors (which names will be kept anonymous) 2 said they were of
Hispanic descent and the third said he was Filipino American. The first and last of the surveyors
were there to get their IPhones repaired while the other had recently came out from buying
himself the new IPhone 6S. The first surveyor had only used the IPhone for 3 years, the second
said 5 years, and the third claimed to have been using and sticking to the IPhone and other
IPhone related products for 10 years. Clearly they were all there originally because of the fact of

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the IPhone product so I skipped that question. The first and third surveyor said that they had
discovered IPhones through television media; the second however said he saw an ad online.
To my final question they all gave me the same response, yes. Since they all had a majority of
their personal lives invested into their phones. They brought up notions of how they needed it to
talk to their friends and family. Along with all these social apps like Facebook, Twitter, and etc.
People now are so often preoccupied with work and their daily lives they have no time inbetween to focus on their social lives. Apple has figured out how to make themselves a part of
peoples lives by convincing the public that with the creation of the IPhone they could close that
gap between the priority of ones daily life and their social life.

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Works Cited