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Apple Store Employees Soak Up the Atmosphere, But Not Much Cash
raque writes "The NYTimes is reporting on just
how badly Apple Retail employees are being paid. Apple is exploiting its fan base for cheap labor. This is one reason I don't go to Apple Stores if I can avoid it. Stores like NY's Tekserve offer a great shopping experience without so exploiting their workers." Would you rather start at an Apple store for $11.91 an hour (average starting base pay, according to the linked article) and an employee discount, or at Tiffany for $15.60?
My wife works at an Apple store and pulls in $29.15 an hour working the genius bar. Which means that she would have been able to qualify for the mortgage we took out three months ago just on her salary. The 25% employee discount is nice also.
Methinks the poster has an axe to grind with his inflamatory language.
Funny how the summary didn't note why the article was just published, Apple just gave everyone raises. Reports are that geniuses are being paid in the ballpark of $30 an hour now, which is reasonable for an IT focused job.
From TFA:
"Even Apple, it seems, has recently decided it needs to pay its workers more. Last week, four months after The New York Times first began inquiring about the wages of its store employees, the company started to inform some staff members that they would receive substantial raises. An Apple spokesman confirmed the raises but would not discuss their size, timing or impetus, nor who would earn them.
But Cory Moll, a salesman in the San Francisco flagship store and a vocal labor activist, said that on Tuesday he was given a raise of $2.82 an hour, to $17.31, an increase of 19.5 percent and a big jump compared with the 49-cent raise he was given last year."
Are you telling me that people cannot live on 22K/year?
Here is a man that raises his family of four on 27K/year: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/06/01/raising-a-family-on-under-2000-per-year/.
I live on 28K/year (making 90K/year, mind you!).
My two roommates live on the 12K/year stipend for their research.
My girlfriend lives on 15K/year.
None of us are on welfare. All of us have savings cushions. All of use drive our own (paid for) cars (between 15 and 4 years old, mine is the oldest). All of us can afford to do reasonable things: going to swim with dolphins this weekend, all of us have spent at least 1 week in a foreign country this past year, several of us have had theme-park weekends, and we each eat out of the house about once per week. We are not about to claim welfare.
Fuck you.
Groceries are easily $400/mo
Don't eat out much. Buy and cook in bulk. Save leftovers. Buy generic over brand name, etc. You can get that number down. I'd say $200 a month per person (and I bet there are slashdotters who could get that down to $100 a month per person!) is a good target for most of the developed world, unless you're in an unusually expensive location.
Such attempts at cost savings don't make much sense, if you earn a lot of income since they often take time to do and your time is more valuable doing other things.