Company: Apple
Date: 2018-01-24
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Great Place To Start
Pros: The products and people you work with are honestly brilliant.  The benefits are great and if you put in at least half effort, Apple Retail will groom you into a crazy good employee.  To survive you have to assimilate to culture, but it teaches you how to navigate political environments.  I can honestly say the skills I learned at apple have been some of my biggest assets in the professional world since I left.  I am really grateful.
Cons: The managers get in their own way.  Things are HIGHLY political.  They will dangle the carrot of promotion in front of you and then just promote the people they like.  It really is a favorites game.  There are plenty of employees who are obviously incompetent that get promoted because they can talk the talk, even though they can't walk the walk.  It is honestly really sad.  As long as you make an appearance of doing work you are gold.  "Experts" will often time have "meetings" in front of the store to appear like they are trying to "develop" other associates just so they can appear to management like they care.  In reality the conversations are all talk and nothing happens.  

My advice to new associates: kiss up to all of the managers and you will make full-time and then advance in no time.

Griping aside, navigating this made me able to dealt with any political environment I faced in the office.