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Apple Store Employees Aren't Allowed To Say 'Crash', 'Bug', or 'Problem' (theguardian.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader mspohr shares a Guardian article which argues that Apple Store employees "are underpaid, overhyped and characters in a well-managed fiction story" who "use emotional guile to sell products":
When customers run into trouble with their products, geniuses are encouraged to sympathize, but only by apologizing that customers feel bad, lest they implicate Apple's products as the source of the trouble. In this gas-lit performance of a "problem free" brand philosophy, many words are actually verboten for staff. Do not use words like crash, hang, bug, or problem, employees are told. Instead say does not respond, stops responding, condition, issue, or situation. Avoid saying incompatible; instead use does not work with. Staff have reported the absurdist dialogues that can result, like when they are not allowed to tell customers that they cannot help even in the most hopeless cases, leading customers into circular conversations with employees able neither to help nor to refuse to do so....
[I]n a move so ridiculous it's almost certain to be a hit, the Genius Bar has been rebranded the "Genius Grove". Windows are opened to blur the distinction between inside and outside, and the stores are promoted as quasi-public spaces. "We actually don't call them stores any more," the new head of retail at Apple, former Burberry executive Angela Ahrendts (2017 salary: $24,216,072), recently told the press. "We call them town squares."
The article argues that since there launch in 2001, Apple Stores "have raked in more money -- in total and per square foot -- than any other retailer on the planet, transforming Apple into the world's richest company in the process."
But it also complains that Apple's wealth "flows from the privatization of publicly funded research, mixed with the ability to command the low-wage labor of our Chinese peers, sold by empathetic retailers forbidden from saying 'crash'."
[I]n a move so ridiculous it's almost certain to be a hit, the Genius Bar has been rebranded the "Genius Grove". Windows are opened to blur the distinction between inside and outside, and the stores are promoted as quasi-public spaces. "We actually don't call them stores any more," the new head of retail at Apple, former Burberry executive Angela Ahrendts (2017 salary: $24,216,072), recently told the press. "We call them town squares."
The article argues that since there launch in 2001, Apple Stores "have raked in more money -- in total and per square foot -- than any other retailer on the planet, transforming Apple into the world's richest company in the process."
But it also complains that Apple's wealth "flows from the privatization of publicly funded research, mixed with the ability to command the low-wage labor of our Chinese peers, sold by empathetic retailers forbidden from saying 'crash'."
When I bought an iphone 6, I though I was investing on a couple years phone, and bought a 128MB model. It was my 2nd iPhone after all.
Big mistake. Apple turned it slow with the infamous updates "to keep old batteries happy".
I just switched to Android, a 200 Euro/USD phone is more than enough to use and drop every couple of years.
On the bright side, I am not also giving my business to a company that only cares about fake political correctness and about using their foothold on business to promote whatever Tim Cook things about political or sexual issues instead of caring into improving technology.
I sure as hell get that at every shop I walk into these days. And it ain't restricted to tech products at all.
My interaction with most sales staff at most shops usually end very abruptly, and often rudely now. Simply because they are clearly not trying to help in any meaningful way. Which is usually is around questions of specs and function of the products they are meant to be selling!
They may as well be machines.
One business that has always been profitable is telling people that changing there attitude will change their situation. Currently, TED talks are a popular platform for this. "If you see everything as an opportunity, it becomes an opportunity!" Some people believe that and there will always be people who believe that because believing the trope is much easier than the alternative - facing and solving hard problems.
It's believable for two reasons. It's so attractive - we WANT t believe that all these hard problems can be solved just by changing our attitude. Also, it's inverse is true, making it an attractive fallacy of the inverse. It's true that if we have a defeatist, hopeless, victim attitude, we won't solve our problems.* We'll whine about them, we'll blame others, and we won't solve anything.*
Of course does NOT mean that the right attitude magically solves our problems. A "can do" attitude, fortitude, looking for the opportunities we can leverage, determination is a *prerequisite* to finding solutions. It's not the solution. It's what you have to do *before* you find the solutions, and *after* you frankly acknowledge the problem.
* If this truth that an attitude of victimhood and blaming others doesn't solve any problems reminds you of a certain political party, that's not my fault. They chose that approach.
Sometimes the Guardian is a great source, but other times they're just delusional.
But it also complains that Apple's wealth "flows from the privatization of publicly funded research, mixed with the ability to command the low-wage labor of our Chinese peers, sold by empathetic retailers forbidden from saying 'crash'."
"Privatization of publicly funded research"? That's mind-bogglingly stupid. Show me a PhD economist who claims to prove otherwise, and I'll show you extremely strong evidence that motivated reasoning is a thing. By that standard we should run all airlines as public utilities because none of our current plane designs would be possible without WW1-era-government-funded R&D.
The claim that Apple retail employees are "low-paid" is slightly less stupid, so I'll bother to refute: as someone who is roughly 19 years into a retail career, I have never made the same hourly Apple employees do. I know, I have repeatedly applied to their stores, because even the shelf-stocking guy makes 30% more then I currently do. To get their wages in a non-Apple setting you need to be at least a department supervisor. It's also an amazing place to work precisely because they don't have commission. You can sell someone a $400 iPad or $799 Mac Mini instead of selling them a $3k laptop or $6k Mac Pro because you make the same either way.
In terms of Chinese wages being low, that's a bit of left-wing lore that was true ten years ago, but is quite exaggerated today. Chinese factory workers would not put up with the Communist Party if they hadn't been given some very nice raises in recent years. They make less then US factory workers, particularly factory workers on old Union contracts, but not that much less. It's also somewhat silly to damn Apple for doing something literally every other company in the world does.
The rest of the article it doesn't improve. No shit Apple tries to control every aspect of the customer experience, so does literally every other company on the planet. At my retail company there are actually tasks that I am supposed to perform in 90 seconds, and the computer adds all these tasks up, plus all the time I have devoted to said tasks, and if I was taking an average of 2 minutes per task I would in huge trouble. No shit Apple wages (which start at $14.50 an hour and go up fairly rapidly from there) can't support a family of four, but if it couldn't support a family of three half my coworkers would have literally starved to death years ago. The only guys who make $14.50 an hour are management and the handful of guys who got hired in back before they started hiring High School kids with no home improvement experience.
but only by apologizing that customers feel bad
This has become the norm in any corporate apology. No matter how badly they've performed, the best you'll get out of any big organisation is something along the lines of:
"We strive at all times to provide the highest levels of customer service and satisfaction. I am sorry if you feel that we have failed on this occasion."
Never any kind of admission that they have ballsed up, no matter how much evidence there is that they have made a phenomenal pig's ear of things. Instead they try to suggest that it's your fault really - you're being over-sensitive, and it's not really their fault.
The really stupid aspect of this is that a decent apology can win you customers. I used to run a small mail order business, and when we got something wrong we would instantly take the blame and apologise. "Oh, whoops! Sorry - that's my fault." People were so surprised at this kind of honesty that it won us some of our most loyal customers. Big business though seems absolutely determined never to issue a real apology, and by so doing they merely alienate the general public.
âoeWar is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.â
What, you thought only communism used propaganda?
This comes from the people who made the infamous 1984 ad.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Heh, yeah. It's a little sad how something that starts out as an explicit rejection of dogma and over-reliance on process can itself become dogmatic in a very short period of time. I guess that's just human nature. My takeaway is that relying on any sort of single methodology (without regular introspection) to achieve excellence is ultimately doomed to fail, because without understanding the motivation behind an innovative / effective methodology or process, one is doomed to either misapply it where it doesn't make sense, or to continue to use that same process beyond its useful lifespan.
Naturally, a manager who bans words they don't like to hear isn't going to be interested in much introspection or innovation in their workers' processes. Dogma is so much more comfortable to fall back on, because you don't have to actually think, or make hard decisions.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
If people at your company think that phrasing things differently is what will help them improve, then you're in a corporate cargo cult.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Part of that lifestyle they're selling is the lie that users of their products are at the cutting edge, using Apples innovative products.
This marketing style, like most of their work, is of course derivative as hell. It is how e.g. the sports branch went from commoditised sneakers to 'Just Do It!' lifestyle markers, increasing their markup by magnitudes at the same time.
Apple is a branding and marketing exercise, the Nike of the computer industry.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
If you actually admit to a fault, you provide evidence for a lawsuit.
I once wrote a longish essay saying more or less that.
React - you eat prawns that have been warm (which they have, because you live near the Mediterranean 5000 years ago) and you get ill and throw up.
Reason - you notice the connection between eating prawns that have been warm (which they have, because you live near the Mediterranean 5000 years ago) and being ill. You become noticeably less keen on prawns.
Religion - eating prawns is taboo! Don't even look at them, sinner!
Except now we have refrigeration.
I'd accidentally hit upon somebody's model, but I forget the name.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Here in Sweden all the shit the politicians has created are called challenges. And supposedly we need more politicians to solve their shit. Gas them all.