Apple Retail Store Is A Horrible Place To Work, Says Former Employee at 5th Avenue Store

Yesterday we wrote a post about the Apple Store walk out scheduled for October 3rd at 1 pm due to many complaints about management. In our post, we had a former Apple employee from the 5th Avenue Store leave us a comment and gave us some amazing insight into what management is doing behind the scenes at the Apple store and some of the crazy things happening there. Here’s the entire comment. Please keep in mind, this is the perspective of only one former Apple employee.

I was one of the original workers at the Apple store on Fifth Ave, pictured above. My first day working in a live store (I had already done training and store set-up) was opening day. It was a cool experience. Every day after that was a nightmare. The pay was horrible, but it was retail and I had come in expecting that. The customers were mean and commonly childish. A customer tried to get into a fist fight with me one time. Again, it was retail and I understood. It was also a zoo in that store due to it’s high profile and being the only one open 24 hours a day. To give you a few examples, we had a group of transvestites that would set up dates on myspace in the place. When security decided to escort them out because they caused a scene, one pulled a knife. Security caught people shooting heroin in the bathroom. A homeless man destroyed one of those spherical children’s chairs because he took on a dump on it. During a peek a shift I was working, a man pulled out his penis and took a picture in photo booth and set it to the desktop. There are so many more stories my friends and I could tell. But, I knew it would be an interesting job coming in and I was prepared for it.

I would also like to say that my direct supervisors, the lead mac specialists were awesome to work for. They were professional, understanding, and really good at their jobs. That being said, the management was incompetent, mean, and highly unethical. I believe that Apple created this problem by creating a highly perverse set of incentives for the management. First, they drastically reduced the pay scale for non-mangerial employees from when they first started opening stores in 2001. Most employees of that era were gone at that point, rich off their stock options. When I arrived, there was a bonus structure for the entire store and also for sales people. The sales bonus went like this, $500K in sales, $500, $1m in sales, $1000, and $2m, you received $2000. This was in a single quarter. At the time I started working, only two people had ever hit the $2m mark, both were from the Soho store, and one was one of my supervisors at the store. He was one of the best bosses I ever had. Also, he was good at his job. I think he left Apple last year. Either way, the sales bonuses were pretty hard to hit in a single quarter and not many salespeople ever got one until Fifth Ave opened. In the first full quarter, something like 30-40 hit 500K and at least 10 hit 1 million. The day after this result was announced, it was also announced that the bonus structure would be discarded. I believe everyone received a slight raise, like 80 cents or something like that. Truthfully, the difference between the bonus and the pay raise was minor in total compensation especially after taxes ate 50%, but psychologically hurt the chain. The real problem was that management was still capable of getting bonuses and I saw one manager state that this could be as much as 133% of salary. So, there was a huge incentive to push the employees hard. Unfortunately, many of the managers at 5th avenue were incompetent and used harsh, dishonest, and counter-productive tactics to make sure they got their bonuses. When I had had enough, I quit and went on to grad school. At the time, I had thought these types of problems were isolated to my store. I assumed it was a big store, with a unique set of issues and corporate was trying to treat it like it was any other mall store. As I’ve seen from the outpouring of other former employees, I was wrong. So, I will give you some examples of things 5th Ave managers did that I thought was really messed up.

- Sales and management are judged by their attachment rates. This means the ratio of service extras you sell per computer. During my time you had to sell 60-30-30. This means that for every 10 computers you sold you needed to sell 6 apple care warranties, 3 .mac subscriptions, and 3 procare memberships. At my store, dishonest tactics were encouraged to sell these types of extras. When I told management I refused to lie or be dishonest with customers, I was berated and told that it wasn’t lying and that the customer just doesn’t understand what they need. One major problem with my store was that we had a huge international client base. They would come on vacation to NYC and with a favorable Euro to Dollar exchange rate, they could basically buy laptops at half price compared to their home country. These people also could not buy Applecare from the US as it had to be registered to a US address. Management demanded that we try to convince them to find someone to register it to in the US. If they didn’t have anyone, tell them whatever you had to convince them it was necessary. Also, always guarantee they could get service in their home country, even if that couldn’t be guaranteed. At the time, the only places outside of the US service could be guaranteed was Japan and the UK, because they actually had apple stores. One manager basically told me to lie to customers. The problem was, if you didn’t keep the attach rate at or above 60% the management would get angry at you because it threatened their bonuses. This was worse for us because 3-4 out of 10 customers could not buy it. So, we had to sell to pretty much every person who could and we came pretty close. The quarter I left we were at 56%. Salespeople engaged i shady tactics, including one guy I knew who would slip the stuff in to people’s pile of software they were purchasing with their computer and hope they wouldn’t notice. Another thing I asked about was procare. We were telling customers that they would be guaranteed a one on one training session for an hour every week if they bought it. This was not realistic because we didn’t have enough trainers. I never felt comfortable telling people this, but management told me I should be telling them this and it’s the customers responsibility to sign up on time.

-The management and HR did a horrible job with schedules. They would keep you from going to lunch then yell at you when you didn’t take your lunch break. They would stagger your schedule, putting you on a late night shift and then the early morning shift the very next day, guaranteeing you would have little sleep or time to eat in between. If you lived far away from the store, you were doubly screwed. Schedules would come out late all the time, sometimes coming out only a day or two before the week began. Schedule requests were commonly refused and even when they were accepted you would have to vigilantly check to make sure you weren’t scheduled. If you were and you didn’t know, even if you had permission not to come in, you could get reamed out by management for not showing up. One grievous example of this incompetence was a friend of mine who was a part time runner. When he took the job, he marked that he was not available before 3 o’clock. That’s because he had another full time job from like 6-2. They would schedule him anyway. He would tell management, they would correct it, but never get it right. Eventually, he didn’t show up for a morning shift he shouldn’t have been scheduled for and was fired. Have a family emergency, well that’s just too bad. My mom almost died and had to be rushed in for emergency surgery and they didn’t want to give me time to go see her. Another co-worker wanted to go home to say goodbye to her dying grandmother and was told it was a black out time for vacation because it was the christmas holiday. She eventually just stopped showing up.

I could go on and on with stuff like this. Staff members were fired because the management was incompetent. People were fired for stuff they did wrong. But, this also applied to lower management as well. After I left, someone told me that one manager got fired the day after he came back from one of his parent’s funeral.

I honestly could go on and on. Some of you may think I am just whining and that’s work. I must not be used to hard work or something. At one point in my life, I worked on a cattle ranch. I had to do stuff like dig trenches for water lines, clean up animal waste, haul dead animals away, every kind of manual labor imaginable. I would take that job over working for Apple again. I have no problem with work and have been accused of being a workaholic at different times in my life. My problem was the dishonest, mean, and incompetent management staff at apple. I took the job not because I had to, but because I respected the company. When it became too much, I simply left. Others may really need the job. I feel for them. Apple is getting what they deserve. I really hope this spreads to other stores. I heard one person say that that’s capitalism and if you don’t like retail, don’t work in it. Well, that’s a double edge sword and it looks like Apple retail is about to catch the bad edge. The funny part is that Apple utilizes a lot of slick internal propaganda to convince their employees that they care and that it’s a privilege to work for them. In fact, it attempts to convince the Apple employees they are lucky they have an employer that cares so much. Don’t believe the hype. I would rather go back to cleaning up animal waste.

Many jobs have management that are somewhat clueless but this employees experience seems to be a very unique one. I don’t know what to really think. I’m sure there are many other employees who feel the same way.

Does this change your perspective of Apple and its method of doing business? If anyone else has any other experience to share, let us know.