Apple Store “Geniuses” are easy to hate on because of their smarmy appearances, but if you had to deal with the crap they do on a daily basis, you may get a bit of a complex too. Popular Mechanics (of all places!) had an anonymous Apple Store employee reveal to them several aspects of working at an Apple retail store that you may or may not have known.
Here are some highlights:
On dealing with the types of people that come in the store to use the computers:
A lot of teenagers come in and use Photo Booth and then ask us how to upload their shots to Facebook. A lot of homeless people come in and do live webcasts. Those are fine. Then we have some really scary homeless people who come in and listen to death metal really loudly on the Bose speakers. My favorites are the teenagers who play Britney Spears really loud and start dancing. Not many people use the computers to access porn, but a lot of people change the languages on them. And it isn’t easy for us to figure out how to switch it back from Korean or Russian!
On dealing with drug dealers:
We get a lot of drug dealers who try to buy iPhones with fake IDs. You can tell them instantly just by how shady they act, and they know you know, but you obviously can’t start accusing them of being drug dealers—they are customers, after all. But when they try to check out, they’ll use what are obviously fake IDs or fake credit cards, and it often turns out they’re using a dead person’s Social Security number or something. And when you call them out on that—then, they run.
There are still some perks to the job, though. Apple’s sitting on a bunch of cash and what better way to use it than to indulge their retail employees a little bit:
During the iPhone 4 launch, they brought us food—and good food! Somebody told me that the 5th Avenue store in New York had a masseuse during one launch, and that another store had a kiddie pool full of goldfish as, like, a Zen thing. They also really emphasize how important it is for us to stay hydrated, and we can get big bonuses if we work really long hours on a launch day.
via Confessions of an Apple Store Employee – Apple Store Tips – Popular Mechanics.
