Earlier this year, it was  confirmed  that Apple is opening a new store in New York’s Grand Central soon, which looks absolutely  stunning. A couple of days before the grand opening, Apple took down the tarps covering the front of its soon-to-open Grand Central Terminal Store, which revealed the entrance to one of the company’s largest retail location in the world. Yesterday, the grand opening for the store happened and the number of people that showed up was mind blowing. “A lot of people” or “massive” would be an understatement.  Apple’s massive new  retail store  in Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal opened to the public yesterday at 10:00 AM.

The store is expected to occupy 23,000 feet and it is also  to  generate  half-a-billion in sales a year, which is probably more than all Microsoft stores combined. With the type of crowd seen in the video below, there’s no doubt it won’t if not more. Fortune noted that  main concourse of the terminal was filled with hundreds of people waiting for the store to open as hundreds more red-shirted Apple employees prepared to welcome them. You know those wannabe Microsoft Stores? Yeah, those ones. When was the last time you saw these many lined up outside a Microsoft Store grand opening for a Microsoft product? Instead, majority of the time they are just waiting in line for free concert tickets…

Apple also handed out store-specific t-shirts to early visitors.  Fortune  reported that Apple had prepared to hand out 4,000 T-shirts for yesterday’s opening.