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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.
"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?"
I think the people who work at Apple Stores -- and others waiting for callbacks -- have already answered that.
What, supply and demand suddenly can't drive wages now?
But I imagine this, like any article on Foxconn (aka "Apple factory"; forget all other customers), will be another anti-Apple free-for-all, so have fun!
With US unemployment at a six month high and the global economy in the tank, a story comes out that people making > $11 / hour at the local Apple store have it hard off?
Pretty sure that there are 10 people waiting in the queue for every 1 job that opens up at one of these stores.
Are you kidding me? They have no specialized skill. It's a basic retail job. Some people in the US would kill for $12 an hour. And you even get to hang out in the air-conditioning. Give me a break.
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."
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?
Hard to say. I'd have to run the math, factoring in such variables as value of store stock, ease of concealment, average return for Apple/Tiffany product on the black market, sophistication of store security and employee monitoring, etc.
At the risk of being redundant, these are retail clerk jobs, and don't require a whole lot of skill.
People walk into the store ready to buy a computer. I've never seen a clerk in an Apple store actually sell someone a computer who didn't already want one.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
has gone up dramatically since the 1990s, and the Consumer Price Index has essentially been 'gamed' to hide all of this.
gasoline in particular went haywire about the same time that the commodities exchanges switched from open pits to electronic trading (see the book Asylum by McGrath-Goodman for more information)
food is linked to gasoline of course, but it still doesn't explain why flour is fluctuating up and down by 100% every few months.
housing of course went through the roof thanks to the subprime mortgage securities and their deriviatives (CDOs, Synthetic CDOs, etc), and the foreclosure robo-signing scandal has backlogged the system so much that prices still havent come down properly.
in other words, yes, things have changed.
Minimum wage is the norm. I work for a pretty good employer (Home Depot), and I get a raise whenever minimum wage goes up. I do not get the opportunity to work inside in air conditioning. I am expected to help people load their cars with their purchases, which more then once have literally weighed a ton (50 40 lb bags). My option for advancement exist, but none would get me to $11.91/hr. I do not get an employee discount of any kind, on anything. I could have benefits, but they require premiums and on $8/hr premiums are impossible.
To hire someone who's labor cannot justify the "living wage" is to engage in charity and many small business owners cannot afford to be that generous.
if you cannot afford to run your business without slave labor then society should not allow your business to remain open.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you can't figure out why the New York Times considers New York City labour issues to be news
Well probably like the rest of the planet he understands the New York Times is an international newspaper, not a city rag.
And did you post that after the part about them talking about New Hampshire, not New York? Or did you just miss that yourself?
Not a Times reader I guess.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Teenage unemployment is skyrocketing and yet we have some of the lowest minimum wages(adjusted for inflation) the country has seen in its modern history. It's almost like wages have nothing to do with teenage unemployment at this point.
LOL. It only prevents us from having riots in the streets like in the good ol' days of robber baron capitalism. You know, even rich people understand that if there are too many destitute poor people around them, sooner or later there's going to be a fight, and the poor are numerically superior...