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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."
So, I broke Slashdot tradition and read TFA.
Short version:
This store was staffed by, and managed by, a bunch of power-mad dicks who were all either fired or left. Several employees were caught stealing or scamming the system, and fired and forced to pay for what they stole, and now the system is harder to scam.
Isn't that how it's supposed to work? Bad people are forced out, and system is improved to limit the behavior of bad actors? I mean, I get it, we all hate Apple, (STEVE JOBS WAS AN EVIL THIEF!) but I don't quite see the story here. Tellingly, the main storyteller, "Ronald" is still unemployed, presumably because his past references are something to the effect of "this guy stole our stuff and abused our customers" and now trying to get some some of satisfaction by trashing his employer for not stopping him from being a huge dick?
This story is actually relevant; anyone using Apple products may have dealings with these stores at some point. If there are similar shenanigans going on at McDonalds, Fry's or other well known chains (and I am sure that there are), then there's a news item. Nothing world shaking, just interesting.
If you think this is an example of how bad the Apple hype is getting, then you have no idea. Head over to Apple fan sites for any or all of the following:
- Review of an iPhone, with a lengthy description on the orgasmic joy of taking an iPhone out of its packaging.
- An exited article about rumours on what the new iPhone's dock connector is going to look like.
- Pictures of "leaked" parts intended of the new iPhone 5, such as the logic board, the battery, and said dock connector. Popular enough to prompt criminals to circulate these pictures in a PDF that has been infected with some malware.
- "Apple working on red iPhone bumper".
All actual articles taken from Apple fan sites. Not quite up there with Woz' balls, but still...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I can, if you like.
I used to own a small company (myself and 2 others started it, it grew to 8 people when we sold it, so it was never large.) By far the largest expense every year was the trade show budget. Even building (as far as union labour allows) our own booth / tearing it down / manning it ourselves / sharing hotel rooms, a trade show averaged to ~$50k, and we did two per year (NAB in Vegas and IBC in Amsterdam). if you consider the time taken out of normal working hours for all that, as well as how long we sweated over making sure the demos were as good as we could make them, it's a lot more than that.
If some clueless moron went around sabotaging the equipment that we set up "just so" to highlight what we were trying to show, I'd be furious. You get about 20 seconds to 'hook' someone hovering around your stand at a trade show, then a max of ~5 mins to show off your wares if they are interested. If *anything* goes wrong, it's game over, which is why we worked so damn hard to make our (very complex) system look effortless for every demo.
When a sale is worth ~$20k+, you have to come over as competent, what you're selling has to demonstrably do its job, and you generally have to give a good impression. None of that is achieved if you are suddenly scrambling to find why the fucking TV has turned off. You look like an incompetent maroon, and you've lost the potential sale.
To a large company, this is an inconvenience; to a small company, trade shows are lifeblood. You *need* word of mouth to consistently generate sales, and more people will talk about "that little company that made best-of-show" (which we did, twice) than something they saw in an ad, or something that a cold-call salesman phoned them up about.
Ours was a happy story, we wrote the asset management that still (to my knowledge) runs ILM (amongst others) today, and we got a pretty good deal for the company, but it was touch and go for a year or two and during those years something like this could have pushed us over the edge. Word of mouth works both ways. ... ("they don't even know how to turn on a TV"). If it had, then thats a whole bunch of people out of work, as well as a massive financial mess for me and the other two owners.
You go into business knowing it is a risk, you try to minimise that risk as much as possible, but you don't plan for self-aggrandizing idiots intentionally trying to break your company for their own financial gain. Everything the bastards at Gizmodo do is about getting more page hits and therefore more ad revenue. For them, it's all about money in their pocket, and frankly they don't give a shit about how they do it or what consequences will fall on others because of their actions.
So yeah. They're a bunch of assholes as far as I'm concerned, too.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!