I really enjoyed Philip Michaels’ post at Macworld yesterday, in which he discussed the success of retail Apple Stores over the years: you hear a lot about Apple Stores opening, but you never hear about them closing again.

When the news first came out that Apple was going to start opening its own chain of retail stores, there were groans from far and wide. “Apple’s a computer company,” the cynics said (myself included). “They’ll never make retail work.”

Oops. On the contrary, Apple has made retail work, and Philip’s post spells out some of the reasons why: Apple has looked to the long term, taking losses in the early days with the expectation that profit will come later. And it has chosen the store locations with great care, picking out high-profile, high-traffic spots that will pull in a very large number of people, lured in by window displays of attractively priced iPods.

A new Apple store opens this Thursday, just up the road from me in Bristol, and it conforms to the rules. It will be located inside the shiny new Cabot Circus development, a vast mall erected where once there was a grimy, dismal 60s shopping area.

As usual, the store’s opening will be marked with hoopla, cheering, and free T-shirts for the first 1000 people through the door. I’m going to go along; not for the T-shirts, but to meet some of those people.