Company: Apple
Date: 2021-04-07
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Genius Admin
Pros: Relatively good stock options (RSU, given annually).
Free food on shift from time to time and other small perks.
Very talented and amicable team of colleagues. Managerial staff very understanding, reasonable and helpful.
Most important: Looks good on a CV.
Cons: All of these are core issues which are company-specific and do not in any way relate to the genuinely fantastic team of people who work in the retail stores.
Incredible amounts of stress/ being overworked. Throughout my time there, less and less freedom and trust was afforded to us in the way that we worked, often forcing us to not be able to present adequate solutions to customers, and indeed often forcing us to say things to the customer that we didn't agree with and which were totally unreasonable.
Gym and dental reimbursements simply not accepted despite constant emails to HR (I tried for 6 months to get these through HR and I left the company and never received these. £650 out of pocket).
Most of the workforce is talented and capable of getting a higher paid job elsewhere rather than being stuck in retail and being overworked, but Apple ties you into its ecosystem. Whilst the RSUs are very much welcome, these vest over three years and are therefore another way in which many amongst the workforce are essentially trapped.
Most of the workforce who want to progress internally are put in makeshift 'career experience' roles which second them to another position and give them the sense of progression without the physical achievement, doing a higher-paid job for no change in salary. In the event that the opportunity to progress is achieved, it often means relocating elsewhere in the country to another store.
Brainwashing of staff to follow a 'credo' (I didn't subscribe to the 'brainwashing' narrative initially, however it took some time to snap out of it before realising that Apple does much to suck you, as an employee, into its ecosystem and to get you to subscribe to its agenda). In relation, on occasion some very political issues were forced onto staff from higher up via internal channels, in so much as that not having a certain opinion on a certain topic is unacceptable.