Company: Apple
Date: 2014-01-13
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Great experience, but not worth the stress
Pros: Each store has a little of its own culture, but most of them function as a large somewhat-unhappy, way-to-stressed family.
I've retained more friends from Apple than I have from any other job. Dealing with crazy people really does bring people closer together.
While it's a decently ok job and has many cons, there's a lot to learn from Apple's culture and way of doing things. I've learned how to be more patient, how to teach someone in a way that they'll retain the information, how to dumb down tech talk without making the other person feel stupid, and how to talk my way out of an argument. All great skills to have in life.
Lots of great discounts on both Apple and 3rd party products they sell in store.
With all the cons there are, it's a great place to learn, make some friends, and just get paid when you're in college.
Cons: The pay is horrible when you consider how much money an average employee brings in.
Most of management has no idea what they're doing.
Store leaders are almost always out of touch with their employees and their store in general.
Some people think you can get into corporate through Apple retail...Yeah that almost never happens.
You will be forced to deal with some of the rudest customers I've ever seen.
Apple really shot themselves in the foot back in the day when they offered free iPhone replacements on a regular basis for issues such as liquid damage, so it makes it tough to explain to customers that Apple doesn't do that anymore. It makes it tougher to sell Apple Care + and to tell a customer that it's going to be $250 to replace their iPhone 5s that they dropped in the toilette.
If you have the opportunity to work at the genius bar, you will be expected to see one customer every ten minutes for mobile devices (ipad, iphone, ipod) and fifteen minutes for computers. When you take into account that Apple wants you to build a relationship with the customer, acknowledge their issue, assure them you'll do your best to get them out quickly and happy, and fix the issue, it's a difficult task to always stay on time. Your team is judged by being on time, getting great feedback from the customers who come in, availability at the genius bar, and even how long it takes to repair the computers you have. It's a lot to keep up with.
Some stores have ridiculous standards for how many hours or days you must be available to work. At my old store, if you were full time they expected you to have completely open availability. So let's say you can work 40+ hours a week but you have to pick up your kid at a certain time every day so you show "unavailable" for that time, nope, gotta be part time.