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The Worst Apple Store In America — An Employee Confession
Cutting_Crew writes "Gizmodo has a piece that describes one of the worst and most corrupt Apple stores. Two employees recount management exchanging brand new computers for face-lifts (and other things), not just from customers, but also from businesses. Other common activities ranged from destroying devices repeatedly and ringing up new ones (for themselves and friends as fake customers) to outright stealing merchandise and cash. Customers may have also lost their data if they weren't polite when coming in for a repair, or the 'Genius' help may have been intoxicated."
But were any of their previous hack pieces about Apple? Last I read Gizmodo, they were still massive Apple fanboys, to the point of unreadability.
Is it? I've run businesses and if I know one thing about infidelity insurance it's this: they will not pay out if they can show that you saw it coming.
Q: What's the difference between a wage slave and a convicted thief?
A: One of them got caught.
My policy has always been the same: if I catch you thieving, YOU'RE GONE. BOOM! DONE. IMMEDIATELY. From that point you're a trespasser. If you want to fucking argue with that, I've got a bit of CCTV that'll very quickly find its way to Youtube. Do not fuck with me.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
How does the First Amendment protect you from purchasing known-stolen goods?
As far as my "limited understanding" that may need refreshing, the first Amendment protects your right to free speech in the face of the government.
Buying stolen goods that you know are stolen is not free speech.
But. My wife's macbook came from Computers Now in south Melbourne. When it started running slow we took it back to the store. They dragged their heels on the job and I eventually decided to take the machine back. The computer they returned to me had a different metal top cover which was badly scratched. They faked up the sheet which I signed which had purportedly shown the damage when I dropped the laptop off. We argued with them about it but eventually had to accepted a damaged and not repaired computer.
And the Apple store in Doncaster fixed the problem (a broken SATA cable) for 30 bucks as well as upgrading the OS. It took one day.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I own a medium-sized computer store in South Carolina. I had problems with inventory mismanagement and theft a while back, so I installed surveillance cameras in the employee work areas. Every repair bench has an overhead camera that monitors what the employee does to the computer, and monitor and keyboard data at each repair station is logged and recorded to document what each employee does with the customer's software.
The cameras ultimately caught the employees who were stealing from me, and they are now serving time for felony grand larceny.
But, what really solved the problem for me was being more selective in my hiring process, and breaking down and paying for more exhaustive background checks.
Oh, and one other neat trick is never to use the references given by applicants, but ask those references for contact information for other people who know the applicant. The applicant will never give references who know the bad stuff they do.
They did not attempt extortion. Apple made a request and Gizmodo said yes provided it was a formal request, in writing not a phone call. Steve Jobs considered that extortion, because he believed rightly, the purpose of the formal request was to generate a story which would generate page views. That's not remotely extortion.
No one involved in wikileaks as a journalist has been jailed for wikileaks. Both the NYTimes and the Guardian have offices in the USA.
Retail employees start at $11.91 on average. Minimum wage is anywhere from $5.15 to $8.25. So Apple starts their retail sales people between 100+% to 40% above minimum wage. Please clarify what you mean by "barely". Geniuses get larger wages as they have more skills. Now I don't know if you've ever worked in retail sales where most people are part-time and sometimes temporary and get no benefits but starting at much higher than minimum and getting benefits seems to be a good deal to me.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Taco Bell in our area starts people at $10.50. Target starts them at $11.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
What does it have to do with mactards? People making at or near minimum wage won't take their job seriously because it is easy to find a similar crappy job somewhere else. This isn't news. Now to the extent that people think that their company of choice is infallible you can be right. But Gizmodo as mentioned has a reason to not like Apple and has a history of illegal activity so not exactly a reliable source of news. Not saying it doesn't happen at Apple stores, heck this crap happens at most stores I suspect. Just I wouldn't necessarily trust this site to report facts on anything not device teardowns.
Well to be fair, Macs don't have a BIOS system and UEFI is largely irrelevant to their ability to do their jobs. While I agree with your notion that their title has nothing to do with their knowledge, at the end of the day they're able to solve most people's problems and tend to do so in a way that doesn't leave a sour taste in people's mouths (unlike your typical help desk workers).
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Physical coercion is only one type of coercion with Psychological, Legal, and Social being the other types.
You are copying from wikipedia. The type of coercion we are looking for is the kind that falls under the extortion statute. Things like "social coercion" aren't sufficient for extortion anywhere.
Despite their intentions, Gizmodo tried to coerce Apple enter into negotiation
Gizmodo didn't ask for negotiations. They asked for an official request.
for return of the prototype by using their possession of said prototype as leverage. Apple had a legitimate fear that Gizmodo would do financial harm by publishing more details about their prototype or worse sell it to one of Apple's competitor.
If Gizmodo had made a credible threat to sell the prototype like they had a buyer lined up then maybe you could make a case for extortion. When it comes to financial harm you have to show a credible threat of great harm, and while a competitor harm a prototype early might. Honestly I don't think that's even extortion. Change it a bit and have Gizmodo make a credible threat and Gizmodo ask for $50m which gets paid. Now we are talking a realistic extortion. The fact that Apple paid $50m means that both they and Apple understood this as a substantial threat but given how little $50m is to Apple they still might lose.
Its like anything else. Degree of harm matters. There is a difference between getting a finger flick and getting hit with a baseball bat in terms of battery.
Except for the fact, that is wasn't a simple request for something in writing..... /b.
Chen never asked Apple for that stuff. He just talked about it. There is no concept of thought crime in American law. Chen is free to think about committing crimes all he wants. If you want to argue that this was a conspiracy to commit extortion you are still missing at least one criminal act in furtherance of the conspiracy.
However, if in this imaginary time line once Chen starts asking for more stuff then this starts being Criminal Possession of Stolen Property. Because then it meets the two criteria.
a) They know its stolen
b) They use it for benefit.
That is still far far short of extortion.
Wages that cause people to feel exploited seem to have a huge effect on employee behavior.
There was a fairly believable story from a Walmart store manager that she stole things like diapers from inventory to give to employees with babies to help compensate for the wages that were to low for them to support their families.
"What was immoral about the Walmart store managers actions?" is an essay question that would probably get you forty different answers from twenty people.
Costco pays their employees well and has negligible product shrinkage, Walmart skimps on pay and has one out of nine items damaged, destroyed, stolen, or is otherwise unaccounted for.
To quote Milton Friedman "People will do what they have to do to survive." Morality is a luxury of the middle class.
Work bio at MMWD