Apple’s retail stores offer managers and executives great lessons about employee engagement and corporate culture.
One of the interesting points in the recent NY Times article on Apple’s retail stores is that many Apple store employees feel like their work experience goes beyond simply bringing home a paycheck and working in a retail store. Apple has deftly made them feel valued and like they are part of something much bigger than themselves.
In doing so, the company provides a model of how businesses can incentivize staff members even if budgets are too tight to offer raises or other perks. There are four broad areas or lessons that managers and executives at any company or organization can learn from looking at Apple retail – all them related to carefully developing a positive and collaborative corporate culture.
Apple made a conscious and important choice about sales commissions and customer experience
Over the weekend, The NY Times posted another investigative piece in its iEconomy series that about Apple. This installment focused on Apple’s retail stores. As with previous articles in the series, this one focuses on legitimate concerns about the American economy in an age of globalization. Like the other pieces, this one targets Apple specifically and ignores the range of Apple competitors that employ similar practices.
The primary issue that the Times brings up with regard to Apple retail stores is that employees can sell thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of Apple products and still earn a relatively modest wage. The underlying sentiment is that if a retail employee sells so much hardware, he should earn more because he is contributing to Apple’s vast revenues.
The only way for things to shake out that way and remain fair would be if Apple offered performance-based awards or commissions. Apple chose not to do that because doing so would have delivered a fundamentally different customer experience than the one envisioned by Steve Jobs – a fact that the NY Times chose not to explore in any real depth.
NFC isn’t a new technology. Android and BlackBerry phones with NFC capabilities have been available for a while now and various companies have started looking at implementing NFC as a mobile payment or digital wallet solution. Google Wallet being the most well-known while MasterCard’s new PayPass Wallet Services, which the company announced on Monday is the newest and potentially broadest in scope
Apple, however, hasn’t shown much interest in adding NFC to the iPhone. The lack of NFC hasn’t kept mobile payment options off the iPhone – as we’ve recently reported T.G.I. Fridays and Tabbedout, Boston’s light rail commuter service, and AmTrak have all moved to offer mobile payments using the Starbucks app/virtual card model.
A new deal between Apple and location-based deals startup Pirq, to offer daily food and drink deals to the company’s employees in silicon valley could be a sign of Apple testing the waters with both a deals network and whether such ecommerce options make sense for iPhone users.
Today is new iPad day in the rest of the world. At 8AM local time in additional countries across Europe, Mexico, New Zealand and even Macau. As in the US and the other countries in the first wave of launches,. there appear to be plenty of iPads to go around.
When’s the last time you went shopping at JC Penney versus the Apple Store? The venerable retailer, overshadowed by the cheap-chic of Target, is looking to reshape itself by putting the iPhone maker’s former retail chief in charge. Ron Johnson, a 10-year veteran of Apple’s retail effort, explained the retailer and Cupertino, Calif. tech giant share much in common.
If you are looking for the best online deals from an Apple Store, it would pay to head to the United States, or any English-speaking store, a new analysis finds.
Apple will build its biggest store yet in Grand Central Terminal, in the space currently occupied by Charlie Palmer's Metrazur restaurant on the upper balcony.
Just as we exclusively reported last year (and no one believed us), Apple will build one of its biggest retail stores yet in New York’s Grand Central Terminal.
Apple has signed a 10-year lease with New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority to build a whopping 23,000-square-feet store on the upper balcony, the New York Post reports.
The store will fill Grand Central’s north and north-eastern balconies, displacing Charlie Palmer’s Metrazur restaurant. It will be among Apple’s largest stores, about 3,000-5,000 square feet larger smaller than Apple’s biggest stores in London and West 14th Street.
The MTA is offering Apple a special move-in rent of $800,000 (a cool half-mill more than Charlie Palmer’s restaurant is currently paying), and then up the rent to $1 million annually. Apple will pay to refurbish the space, and the MTA estimates it will make $5 mill profit on the deal, and revitalize retail at the popular station.
As we reported yesterday, Apple’s planning something absolutely huge at its retail stores across the country this weekend, possibly to celebrate their 10th Apple Store anniversary. But what could it be? A new product or service? Discounts or goodie bags?
Possibly, but another rumor’s starting to form: Apple is prepping for the September launch of the next iPhone by getting their retail stores equipped to take NFC payments.
Apple is asking its retail employees to sign non-disclosure agreements ahead of a secret, all-hands meeting to be held this Sunday, Apple Insider is reporting. It could foreshadow a major launch, a media event or both.
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