They are labeled geniuses, they surround themselves with the coolest gadgets pushed by a tech giant who’s CEO has become a Silicon Valley rockstar. But does working at an Apple retail location match all the hype? An anonymous Apple retail worker gives a magazine interview, where he says “sometimes the company can feel like a cult.”
“They give us a little paper pamphlet, and it says things like — and I’m paraphrasing here — ‘Apple is our soul, our people are our soul,’ the employee tells Popular Mechanics. “There was this one training session in which they started telling us how to work on our personality, and separating people into those with an external focus and an internal focus. It was just weird.”
“We’re supposed to sell AppleCare product support with just about everything, and honestly those aren’t that hard to sell, since they aren’t a bad deal. But we’re supposed to push MobileMe, and that’s really hard to sell. Nobody ever sells it.”
Look out for Strollers Bearing iPods
“There are security guards everywhere. They are undercover, so you can’t tell who they are. They have to deal with people doing things like wheeling in strollers and trying to use them to roll off with Time Capsules and iPods.”
‘It’s All Sell, Sell, Sell!’
“When I’m there, I get sucked into the competitive culture. Normally I’m pretty low-key, but when I’m at the store, it’s all sell, sell, sell! I wanna work my way up, get promoted and eventually get to the Genius Bar — which is where you want to be. Who doesn’t want to be a genius?”
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
