Company: Apple
Date: 2017-10-02
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Problematic Retail Wage Structure
Pros: Great co-workers, highly underestimated talent pool for you to connect with on a personal level at work, good benefits (yet you are discouraged from unionizing which I think may be borderline illegal?) progressive work environment in terms of race, sexuality, and lifestyle. Rewarding experiences and lots of skills to be utilized in the real world (Apple Retail is not the real world, as much as they say it is)...Tim Cook is also trying really hard to correct the company but Retail and Corporate hate one another.
Cons: First and foremost, transparency and accountability. The hiring process is a bag of nonsense. Even internally, when you apply for a lateral transfer or a position inside your own store, the management lies to you about your chances with impunity, the Store Leader has no clout with the recruiting process yet promises upward mobility. 

There is favoritism, avarice, and a highly political nature to all hiring decisions. The customers are either incredible or absolutely horrible. This job requires the highest extreme of negotiation skills, customer service, and tolerance as people will test you beyond your limits with what they expect and require. 

Apple Retail needs to clean sweep its management tier, the majority of whom were hired from Wal-Mart, Best Buy,  Target and Pacsun...companies that share no values with Apple and love to focus on numbers. Having worked under Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson, the philosophy used to be "work on customer experience, because the products sell themselves" but now it is all about results even though we don't make any commission (which is insane if you do the math) and the management brags about results and company wealth while the average employee is required to know skills required for 80k tech support and IT  jobs while paying them half or less than that and asking them to perform harder on top of those unfeasible numbers.

Apple needs to reshape retail and get rid of the people who have taken over the top tier and are running it like a boutique Circuit City.