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The Five Top Reasons Why You Don't Want to Work in an Apple Store

Posted Feb 18, 2011 at 10:16PM EST by QJ Staff

Listed in: News Tags: apple, Apple Store, ios

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Popular Mechanics interviewed an Apple Store employee, who under a cloak of anonymity, agreed to dish all he dirty details about being an Apple Genius. Here are some of the major reasons it’s not such a great gig—even if you do get to play with toys all day.

Everybody thinks they have inside knowledge, but they don’t. “We are completely in the dark until they do a keynote speech. We have no idea what is coming and are not allowed to openly speculate. You can get into serious trouble if you speculate—especially to a customer. I am asked five times per day about the next iPad or iPhone, and I quite simply don't know. But I would be in huge trouble if I said something like ‘The next iPad is going to have a camera.’ I actually avoid the technology section of the newspaper so I have no points of view to accidentally comment with or drop into conversation. I'd rather just be dumb about it.”

The tremendous pressure to sell “We have a posted list of our metrics, and you can see everybody else’s. It shows you how much money each person is pulling in for the company. If you aren’t doing very well, you start getting manager meetings, and they sit you down and try to figure out why you aren’t selling more. “We aren’t paid on commission, but you fear for your job if you’re not selling enough. We’re supposed to sell AppleCare product support with just about everything, and honestly, those aren’t that hard to sell, since they aren’t a bad deal. But we’re also supposed to push MobileMe, and that’s really hard to sell. Nobody ever sells it.”

The “colorful” clientele “We get a lot of drug dealers who try to buy iPhones with fake IDs. You can tell them instantly just by how shady they act, and they know you know, but you obviously can’t start accusing them of being drug dealers—they are customers, after all. But when they try to check out, they’ll use what are obviously fake IDs or fake credit cards, and it often turns out they’re using a dead person's Social Security number or something. And when you call them out on that—then, they run.”

Pulling phone duty “The worst is when we have to work the Phone Room, which is where calls to the store are answered. The other day, I felt like I was working a suicide hot line. People sometimes call us up and treat us like we're their therapists. Or we have women who want help with their computers as they try to prove their husbands are cheating on them. Usually I just transfer people to AppleCare so I don’t have to deal with them.”

Abuse by customers “It’s amazing how badly behaved some customers are. I have seen customers have complete meltdowns and get phones exchanged that were like two years old. They scream, cry, curse. And it works. People can be horrible. Sometimes it’s like working at McDonald’s, with better pay. I’ve never been treated so badly in my life.”

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