Company: Apple
Date: 2008-12-30
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former

Wonderful people and great working atmosphere. But you're still here to sell computers.
Pros: Working retail at Apple is really one of the most high energy positions I think I've ever had in sales. The employees and management are very upbeat and genuinely happy to be there and ask questions. It's always stressed that as a Specialist, you are NOT a salesperson, but rather a source of information - you are there to inform customers about the products so that they can make the best decision possible rather than pushing them to buy this or that, and as much as that sounds like some kind of corporate line, I always found it to be true in practice. I was never really pushed to sell more or less of any specific product. There are daily/monthly/yearly metrics, yes, but as retail employees don't work on commission, they're more used to track your own sales and progress - there's also some friendly competition between sales staff as well. Management is usually very helpful and accommodating - they can sometimes be inundated with any number of things, but usually if you simply remind them a couple times that you need to sit down for something, etc., they always do their best to find time to resolve your issues.
Cons: This may have changed since I worked at Apple retail, but my training concentrated a lot on customer service and sales, which is great. It did not concentrate too much on store procedures and policy, which isn't too great. I found, at least when I was working there, that there's a lot of "learn as you go" in terms of customer returns, which forms to fill out, who to direct questions to, where items are located in back-of-house (such as service items), etc. While it's not terribly difficult to figure these things out on your own, it would help tremendously if more time was spent on giving this basic information during training so when you encounter those types of situations, you're not left scratching your head or scrambling around to find someone who knows how to do what you need to be doing - it looks unprofessional to the customer. 

Apple corporate also keeps employees in the dark just as much as the general public - when the iPhone was announced in January of 2007, the employees only knew as much as the general public did, and had to resort to looking at the website in order to figure out features, pricing, etc. in order to answer questions. I imagine it was the same a year and a half later for the iPhone 3G. While I can understand an amount of secrecy in order to create the necessary "wow" effect for when a product launches, there has to be some way to brief the employees in the retail channel that are going to be actually SELLING the thing so that they're not caught too off-guard - even just a "be prepared tomorrow, something's coming" would suffice so that people would be mentally prepared.

And when I mentioned earlier that retail employees aren't required to sell certain products, that's really a grey area, and the one place where I was able to keep myself grounded and remember that while Apple is a great place to work, you're still ultimately just selling computers. There are several add-ons or "attachments" that you're expected to at least TRY to sell (mobileme [formerly .mac, which is what I sold at the time], ProCare/One-on-One, and AppleCare). These attachments are included in the daily metrics alongside each system you sold, so you can see what you sell better and what you might need to work on. Management will sometimes just have a quick word with you about your attachment rate if it isn't too hot in some areas and ask if you need help in how to sell these products. That's the only real things that I every felt pressured to try to sell, because while it doesn't affect your employment or pay rate, you nonetheless feel that there is pressure to sell these products with the system, even if you think some of them are worthless add-ons (which I personally felt everything except AppleCare were).