Here's a dumb story. When I was in high school, my friends and I had a game we used to play at the mall: we would go into the Apple store and try to make it to the back wall of the store, touch it, and exit out the front without an Apple staff person talking to us.
We were fascinated with the Apple store in the mall because it was essentially an interactive luxury goods store where they'd let you actually grasp all the luxury goods with your teenager hands. I have no idea what the current policy is in Apple stores, but in the 2000s, the Apple store in my local mall allowed crowds of greasy teens to wander in and start very obviously just fucking around and poking and prodding everything. They would, however, always try to talk to us and ask us whether they could help us.
So we made up a game where you'd try to get through the store and to the back wall and out again without being spoken to. There were no real strategies here - it was all down to luck and just physically avoiding the Apple store workers. It was not, in my experience, possible to melt into the environment and look like someone who shouldn't be spoken to. Apple store staff would speak to anyone. If the store was crowded enough, you could melt into the crowd a bit, but it was no guarantee. The back of the store was always the easiest place to get caught, and touching the back wall was a pretty conspicuous, attention-grabbing action. I think I only won the game a couple times. I had friends who won by sprinting out of the store once or twice.
I bought my first iPod - an iPod 5, I think? - with the salary from my first big summer job. It was more of a stipend than a proper salary, because I was a camp counselor at a summer camp for girls with diabetes, and I was working deranged schedules, and living at my workplace, and my only sustained chunk of free time every day was between 8 PM and midnight, so I was effectively working for 20 hours a day.
They did not pay us a ton for this! But I made enough money from that job to buy an iPod when I returned home for a few weeks before going to my freshman year of college.
Anyway, I remember feeling shocked and kind of disembodied and terrified to have a reason, finally, to personally purchase something from the Luxury Goods Store Which Is Also An Interactive Playplace. I remember that I was acting very strangely during the entire process, speaking oddly to the salesperson, kind of terrified to be spending that much money... but I couldn't get myself to lighten up. Part of my brain was saying "this place is bullshit and I use it to clown on the staff," and part of my brain was saying "I want the luxury good!! and I am going to purchase it now." Much dissonance. I got the iPod and I loved it, though.
I also remember realizing at this time that the reason the Apple store allowed crowds of greasy teens in to prod everything was that we were one of the target audiences for the luxury goods, and it was good for Apple that we were fascinated with their store. They were not asking us if we wanted an iPod because they were trying to interrupt our game - they really did think we might want to buy an iPod, because we really might have been actual customers. I was still 18 years old when I bought mine. I did not look any different, really, than I had a few months before, when we were still playing our game in high school.
The MP3 player I had before that iPod was a much more generic one. I've spent the last few days occasionally checking Wikipedia and other places online to see if I can tell which one it was, and I have absolutely no idea. It might have been a Creative? It certainly wasn't a Zune. I think my parents got it at Walmart.
It left a bigger impact on my life, really, than the iPod, because it was the thing that got me into media piracy, and led me to install Linux on an old laptop, which I used exclusively for media piracy. This increased my computer proficiency dramatically (though not to the point where I became a habitual Linux user) and set off a chain of events that made me much more comfortable with amateur web development and eventually game development.
It's a shame I cannot remember what brand it was! I remember the iPod because it was a luxury good, but I think I owe that old Walmart MP3 player a lot more.