Company: Apple
Date: 2015-08-29
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Apple Retail - Good News: Lot's of Pros, Bad News: Lot's of Cons
Pros: With Apple Retail there is good and bad news. Employment has a lot of benefits and positives but, for the retail environment, as many or more negatives.

- It's the retail side of the most amazing company on the planet having made more of a difference to humankind's current direction with technology then any other -- a company and experience that is a privilege to be a part of

- Benefits are excellent with all the standard benefits being close to if not top notch. Medical insurance starts day one of employment. There is a long list of smaller non-standard fringe benefits only Apple could offer.

- The general work environment is positive, passionate, and high energy with absolute dedication to diversity and a zero tolerance for discrimination of any type.

- If you love technology and/or helping others with it, are honest with good ethics, fairly intelligent, and even if you are a bit on the quirky or mildly eccentric side you will thrive here. 

- The hourly salary is good. Depending on where the store is located can approach being competitive having adjusted for the negatives of a public facing retail setting.

- Intense training with 90% non-technical customer relations and communications training.

- Opportunities to move up are many if you want to stay in retail. Apple lays out a reasonable opportunity to ascend to management or cross-train to other roles but mind you NOT technically. It can be extremely difficult to cross from retail to corporate with a wider and wider gap between the two versions of Apple.

- You will work with amazing, intelligent, thoughtful, and energetic people from all walks of life, cultures, and lifestyles.

- Change and new products keep coming providing you fun cutting edge stuff to sell, fix, work with, and support.

- There are decent discounts on things including a periodic technology allowance on Macs or iPads
Cons: - The Genius and/or Family Room Specialist roles were once considered technical support roles but now less and less becoming more of a customer relations role with technical trappings.

- You are working with the public from all walks of life and every level of intelligence, education, income, and idiosyncrasy -- sometimes bordering on crazy.

- Expect to be stressed most of the time caught between policy and customer demands with management mostly favoring whatever the customer wants. It can seem at times that every customer is an exception to the rule and policies mostly are disposable depending on the pushback from the customer.

- If the customer gets angry at you for following policy you had nothing to do with treating you with extreme rudeness and disrespect that can go as far as being physical, depending on the store and manager, you likely will find yourself under the bus with management expecting you to act as if you did not notice or mind the sacrifice. The manager may even attempt a ‘Jedi mind trick’ to get agreement from you that it was the right thing to do something nice for the customer that did anything but treat you nice under the guise of ‘surprise and delight’.

- The environment of most Apple stores is hyper noisy, crowded, full of customer generated drama and general knee jerk reactionary activity.

- If you are technical and expect to be exposed to technical training realize you will get a little of that but mostly not. This is not a good place to nurture technical expertise. They want you to certify and train on various hardware platforms but won't give you time to do it and really don’t care if you keep up to date with it or not. They will teach you enough to squeeze by and are more interested in how many customers you can process, on time, with as little time spent as possible with each customer without getting a negative review from the customer.

- 99% of the managers are drawn from other retail environments with little or no technical background with the assumption that retail is retail. 

- Apple Retail has developed its own special brand of dogma separate from that of Apple Corporate with pocket wallet reference cards to remind you of what the mission is, mandatory daily/quarterly meetings where you are expected to act enthusiastic and participate in 'fun' team building activities that may remind you of kindergarten or Sunday school. It's well intended but at times makes one feel like you are seen as a child. Some of the managers really take this stuff to heart and it can at times be too much causing you to think they have lost touch with reality while you are in the trenches with customers that are very much in touch with reality. The disconnect can be surreal at times.

- Work/Life balance may forever be an issue with Apple. Your schedule is all over the place days on, days off, time in, time out, mandatory meetings on your scheduled day off, and where you work inside the store. A typical 40 hour week can FEEL like 60 because the schedule is so fragmented and erratic and cut into slices best for the store’s needs and peak times. If you are fortunate enough you may be in a store with a management team that, to their credit, experiment with trying to provide mostly fixed workday schedules. It's too early to tell if efforts like this can last.

- Turn-over and burn-out is HIGH! This means very little lasting expertise stays on board long. The tech support workers are extremely shallow technically. There is an effort underway to automate as much of the technical troubleshooting as possible with guided case-structured repair/replacement ticketing software so non-technical transitory staff can do the work. Sadly, if the title of ‘Genius’ ever was descriptive of the expertise of the person filling the role it certainly is a misnomer now.

- Hope you are working in a newer store. Apple Retail's recent focus on developing showcase stores in other countries has taken the eye off the ball of keeping US infrastructure up to date and well equipped. Older stores are rundown, ill-equipped, extremely crowed with employees, noisy, and generally disorganized leading to much higher employee stress and burn-out and a not so great customer experience.
 
- Apple Retail has an almost cult dedication to the Lominger Competency FYI Card Sort strategy for personal development which attempts to scientifically rate and analyze one’s core career attributes. This blind reliance on this single tool produces an almost lemming quality leader and manager completely disjoint with a company known for using lemmings to show what’s wrong with blindly following anything that diminishes your choice and unique way of doing things in it’s famous 1984 commercial.