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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'."
... back when I was a suit.
At a meeting, I told management that we had a major problem.
My boss corrected me saying, "We don't have problems, we have opportunities."
I said, "OK, then I have nothing to report."
A big wheel raised his hand to my boss and said to me, "No, go ahead and report."
I told him. "We have an opportunity that's causing a major problem."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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.
Everything is awesome, all Apple products are flawlessly perfect. ~ Duke of Duloc
And so the little BUG never got fixed. As a result, several web-facing products began quietly failing. Nobody dared report it as the Ecuadorian embassy is already full up. And so the little BUG grew and grew. One morning, Apple work up to most of the Apple missing. A large worm was then observed munching away down Cupertino Ave and Apple Way, devouring all in its path. It had become unstoppable.....
And the rest kids, is history. Today we can look at these Apple products on display in our museum. Note they are heavily sealed for safety reasons....
This is the endgame of white washing everything, controlling all employees (and consumer) social behavior, political correctness everywhere we turn. You control the message everyone is giving and you can sell to a captive audience without stirring up any resistance.
I don't own an Apple computer but if I did and I needed tech support (which I wouldn't), I would make it my mission to use all the forbidden language and act confused when they didn't respond using the same language. When they finally quit the linguistic acrobatics I'd start yelling, "HERETIC! HE SPOKE THAT WHICH SHALL NOT BE SPOKEN!", pointing and maybe jump on on a table to maximize store-wide attention.
And that's how I plan to get banned from every Apple "town square". ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It is not often that I compliment apple on locking down everything, but I have to say this is a great strategy. It reminds me of choosing the wall color of a business to help affect the mood, having no clocks in a casino, or having the bathrooms at the back of the store.
If you think that behavior is limited to Apple, you are naive. I've been paid to lie and cheat at multiple companies. I usually try to leave such dirt-bags, but such had not been easy during recessions.
Table-ized A.I.
"We agreed not to use the word recession in The White House."
"Then what do we call it?"
"A bagel."
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
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.
Now you're just fucking with us.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
"Overpriced"
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.
I work in the hell of first-line tech support, and whenever I can't reproduce a problem, I have to walk across the site and go visit the user in person so I can view exactly what it is they are doing wrong. Sometimes they do things so strangely wrong that no technical user would ever think of it - like managing all their files via the MS Word open dialog, because they don't know how to open a file manager window. Or spending hours in frustration unable to find their emails because they accidentally clicked the little '-' and collapsed the tree view. Or pointing a remote at their projector and pressing buttons over and over, not noticing that the manufacturer logo on their projector and on their remote are not even remotely the same brand.
If you actually admit to a fault, you provide evidence for a lawsuit.
Anti-political-correctness is fascism pretending to be a defence of free speech. It's supreme irony that for us to have free speech some people think that we have to ban criticism.
So criticism (anti-political correctness) of your criticism (political correctness) of other people's speech is fascism? Why isn't it free speech? How many layers of recursion do we have to go through? Or is it an unnecessary exercise, because the humorless scolds of the left always magically end up in the virtuous column?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
That's a smart-sounding way of putting it because it's very abstract. If you're an activists (and the Guardian are proud to be activists) you use that type of language all the time because it makes you sound several hundred times smarter and it's also extremely hard to disprove. However in this case it's trivial to disprove.
Apple computer did not "build itself on the public dime." They did sell a lot of Apple IIs to schools, but they did so at a huge discount because they figured that dominance in education would lead to major market-share in the home market. They weren't funding themselves with "the public dime," they were subsidizing the public with their own private dimes. They still have a lot of market and mind share in the education market, but since the appearance of the Chromebook that's an extremely low margin market and they stopped working for it. That means no education specific R&D. That means no R&D paid for by the education sector. That means no government-funded R&D.
As for "global race to the bottom" that's an extremely NATO-centric way to put it. Several hundred million Chinese have been brought into the global middle class in recent decades, African living standards have increased greatly, etc. You're convinced that the period from roughly 1950-1985, when a High School educated white man from a NATO country could support an entire family on one salary is normal? No, it's not. It's just not.
Total apathy. The users cannot irritate me, because I have not a single fuck to give about any of them.