In recent years, Apple Retail Store “employees have started to feel like the culture and spirit of the Apple Store has deviated from its original vision as they’re told to prioritize iPhone sales and upgrades. They say the company’s changing mission has hurt its customers,” Lisa Eadicicco reports for Business Insider:
Rich Zeug hasn’t worked at the Apple Store in more than two years. Yet he still remembers a particularly distressed college student with a liquid-damaged MacBook Pro. The customer’s roommate had spilled beer on the computer. “You can’t punish him for that,” said Zeug, who ended up giving the student a discount on the repair. He charged him around $300 for what would have been a $1,240 job…
It’s interactions like these that have defined the Apple Store since its 2001 inception… But since then, as the iPhone has grown to become an increasingly important part of Apple’s business, Zeug said he saw a change in what the Apple Store started to represent. Around the time he left in 2017, Apple started prioritizing metrics like Apple Pay transactions and the number of AppleCare attachments with sales, Zeug said. “It was less about the customer experience and more about the transaction and the sale.” Apple’s push for quantity has turned a once-rewarding customer service and IT job into something robotic.
MacDailyNews Take: In May, Bloomberg News reported that “in interviews, current and former Apple employees blame a combination of factors. They say the stores have become mostly an exercise in branding and no longer do a good job serving mission shoppers like Smith. Meanwhile, they say, the quality of staff has slipped during an 18-year expansion that has seen Apple open more than 500 locations and hire 70,000 people.”
As for Apple Stores, especially the mall stores, what used to be a draw have become something to be avoided for years now due to overcrowding of what seems mainly to be people dealing with broken iPhones competing with people straining to hear free courses due to poor/no acoustical design by Apple interior designers, and asinine wooden boxes strewn about for “seating,” to name just three repellents. — MacDailyNews, April 15, 2019
When we walk into an Apple Store, we want to know where to go. Not mill about at random until someone puts us into some invisible queue. We also want a spacious Genius Bar (not “Grove”) where we can have some actual counter space to talk to an knowledgeable person while looking at the device in question together. It’s not that difficult. Steve Jobs, Ron Johnson, and – drum roll, please – Deirdre O’Brien got it right the first time. O’Brien was there from the outset. So, the good news is that there’s hope left after all. — MacDailyNews, May 7, 2019
