Company: Apple
Date: 2015-06-16
Overall rating: 5/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

A Retail Experience Like No Other
Pros: While competing in a saturated retail environment with their brick and mortar stores Apple consistently distinguishes itself by providing retail employees with an experience significantly superior to almost all other retailers. The corporate culture, while demanding is also more supportive of employees than many others. Active training programs, generous employee incentives, solid team atmosphere and a real regard for supporting customers makes it a rewarding venue for employment. There is a strong "work hard, play hard" attitude driven by the managers and leads. While reflecting the scheduling challenges inherent to retail operations, they still manage to be quite flexible to individual needs. Along with generous healthcare support employees are also encouraged to build stock ownership and retirement accounts even for part-time employees. Especially nice is the deliberately diverse and talented employee population.
Cons: If you are not used to the pace and demands of an active and popular retail footprint, the requirements for participating in an Apple Store can be daunting. Not all managers are created equal. While Apple does a much better job than most in screening and advancing employees and managers, some stores are more challenged than others in how they are managed and the quality of the employee experience. Retail has very tight scheduling needs, and some part-time employees may not be able to support the minimum required scheduled time allocations. Apple products are highly desireable, and as such requires much more vigilance around shrink (shop-lifting, etc.), without being directly confrontative.