Samantha Lee/Business Insider; Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
- Apple's retail stores are often the public face of the company, the branch of the tech giant that's responsible for acquainting customers with the firm's sprawling product line.
- In recent years, employees have started to feel like the culture and spirit of the Apple Store has deviated from its original vision as they're told to prioritize iPhone sales and upgrades. They say the company's changing mission has hurt its customers.
- Current and former Apple Store employees described changes that have in some way made it feel like metrics were starting to overshadow the attention to personal interactions with customers.
- At the same time, changes to Apple's iconic Genius Bar has made some feel like like working there has become less about fixing computers and more about encouraging upgrades and squeezing in as many appointments as possible.
- The changes come as Apple is undergoing a transformation that sees it expanding into new product areas like digital entertainment and personal finance as it seeks to offset slowing iPhone sales.
- Apple declined to provide an on-the-record comment for this story.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Rich Zeug hasn't worked at the Apple Store in more than two years. Yet he still remembers a particularly distressed college student with a liquid-damaged MacBook Pro. The customer's roommate had spilled beer on the computer.
"You can't punish him for that," said Zeug, who ended up giving the student a discount on the repair. He charged him around $300 for what would have been a $1,240 job. Zeug said he wanted to cut the student a break since the accident wasn't his fault, and he already had to pay a fee to recover his lost data.
"No college kid could afford that," Zeug said.
It's interactions like these that have defined the Apple Store since its 2001 inception, a chain where retail staff are trained to put just as much effort into building positive relationships with customers as they do into selling Apple's products.
But since then, as the iPhone has grown to become an increasingly important part of Apple's business, Zeug said he saw a change in what the Apple Store started to represent. Around the time he left in 2017, Apple started prioritizing metrics like Apple Pay transactions and the number of AppleCare attachments with sales, Zeug said. "It was less about the customer experience and more about the transaction and the sale." Apple's push for quantity has turned a once-rewarding customer service and IT job into something robotic.
He's not the only Apple Store employee to feel this way. Business Insider spoke to current and former employees who said they noticed a shift in recent years in the spirit of the tech giant's retail stores. Some said it had become more difficult for retail staff to focus on customers as they felt pressure to boost numbers. Changes to individual store goals and priorities have also made the job feel more transactional and less like they were making personal connections with customers.
Moreover, many of the current or former employees expressed concerns about changes with the Genius Bar, Apple's in-person technical support. They said that its workers were increasingly encouraged to push upgrades, and that Apple Geniuses, the position once promoted by the company as coveted IT career paths, were no longer receiving technical training that's as comprehensive as it once was.
The majority of the dozen people who spoke to Business Insider requested to remain anonymous so that they could speak freely about their current or previous employer. They include eight former employees and four current workers from stores in six different states, spanning the South, Midwest, and New England.
They range from having between roughly one and a half years to more than a decade of experience working for Apple Retail. Half of them worked for Apple Stores for longer than five years, and nearly all talked positively about their experiences working for Apple. Their stories provide a glimpse into how the store's operations and culture have changed as Apple has tackled challenges like slowing iPhone sales, big expansions into new product categories, and corporate leadership changes in recent years.
Apple declined to provide an on-the-record comment for this story.
Do you currently work at the Apple Store? If so, we want to hear from you! Contact this reporter at leadicicco@businessinsider.com
There are 270 Apple Stores in the United States and about 70,000 employees working at them. They will undoubtedly play an important role as the company continues its expansion and pushes new services and gadgets, like Apple TV Plus and the Apple Card. After all, they're not just selling products, they're building and repairing the public's relationships to those products.
"Retail is critical, and part of it is that it's not only a way to sell products, it gives them an avenue to support customers as well," said Gene Munster, managing partner at the venture capital firm Loup Ventures and a longtime Apple observer. "They're the ones doing [that] at scale."
This is not the first time employees have spoken up about how recent changes to the Apple Store have impacted their jobs. Several current and former employees told Bloomberg in May that the store had recently struggled to strike a healthy balance of serving shoppers and making the store a place where customers could learn more about Apple products.
"It's different," one former employee told Business Insider, referring to the overall culture at the Apple Store around the time he left compared to when he started. "And they'll never admit to it being different."
