Apple Reviews

Pros

- Great products and no commission. So we could be honest to make sales
- Extraordinary team workers. Always here to help and step up. Great technical skills also.
- The Apple Fame
- A few discounts as employee

Cons

- Management is totally inadequate. They manage high-skilled and motivated employee like if they were Starbucks seasonal part time people.
- They say what matters is their people but there is absolutely no career possible. You get stuck at the position you got hired for years with a random chance to evolve (poorly). Almost NO ONE makes it from the sales floor to manager.
- Starbucks/Gap/Disney management team. Like mafia, they all worked together prior to Apple. Impossible to join the gang, even if you have the best feedback and results on the floor.

Advice to Senior Management

Store managers should not have the final word about anything concerning their employees's careers. HR should. Right now, if you do an incredible job i the store and want to transfer to another one, if your store manager doesn't want to lose you, he can decline everything you ask. HR has nothing to say about it. Managers can also blacklist you. Even though HR will deny such thing, having a store manager with ALL the powers about your contract is the same. If your manager doesn't like you for any unfair reason, your only choice is to resign (Apple will almost NEVER fire people. Costs too much)

Pros

- decent pay for a college student.
- fun environment of people (various personalities)
- get paid for training and meetings
- get to work with apple products (i.e. listen to music on an iPod, look through Apps on an iPad, and play on the computers)
- management tries their best to work with your school schedule.

Cons

- even though it's decent pay for a college student, def. couldn't make this your career if you aren't a manager.
- holiday retail hours stink
- not enough time to train
- favoritism is definitely seen throughout the entire market.

Advice to Senior Management

read through your feedback comments that the employees make. don't feel threatened that others will steal your job. help employees who wish to make apple their career.

Pros

awesome reputation of course
experiences in an unstructured environment, space to move and make changes

Cons

lack of experienced middle level manager, making organic long-term development for the entire company is somehow hard.
company is more focus on R&D, other than robust supply chain.

Advice to Senior Management

take more time hone your management skill. People leave because of bad manager.

Pros

Average pay and benefits
25% employee discount

Cons

Horrible shifts for 3 months at a time---no flexibility
No flexibilitly with time off, shcedule adherence is more important than serving the customers now.
Before we became home based advisors it was a great place to work, now we are micro managed to the 9th degree. Management has implemented rigid policies that do not allow ANY exceptions to help the customers with their complaints any more. The level of service has decreesed dramatically in the last 6 months due to management advising us to cut back in terms of appeasements and exceptions that had made us #1 for years.
People are not happy at Apple Customer Relations anymore and many are looking for other jobs now despite paying higher than most call centres. The 3 month shift and nights and weekends have destoyed our personal lives but Apple doesn't care it's all about the money.

Advice to Senior Management

What happened???We are breaking records every quarter and now we are going to cut back how we are allowed to serve our customers? When it was decided to be open 7 days a week from 7-11 could you not have hired new people for these shifts? Years of loyalty mean nothing to Apple it is obvious ot us all.

Pros

The epitome of technology
Job respect
Unparalleled benefits package for retail
Fair employee discounts
Get to work with products you love and use yourself
Lateral team members generally very fun to work with

Cons

Customers are becoming more "trend" customers rather than highly educated
Insufficent pay
Dated time measurement and vacation policies
Business needs will never be met by staffing
Development and employee issues will always be put 2nd

Advice to Senior Management

Beging making your priorities your people. Apple preaches how important their people are, they are obviously only talking about corporate employees because retail employees are some really talented people given the nature of the position, but we're constantly having dirt kicked in our face. For the amount of nonsense we deal with completely unrelated to our job, and for the amount of revenue we generate for the company, a little more true recognition would be definitely called for.

Pros

- Having "Apple" on your resume is great
- Working as a Genius is about as good as you can get short of store management
- Getting to play with awesome new technology
- If you get along well with people, you earn the respect of management and are more free to make decisions

Cons

- Growth of retail stores means every day is hectic
- Too many new people get hired and on-boarding process is laughable
- Burnout rate is high among good Geniuses - most of the good ones ending developing something cool and getting a job somewhere else
- They used to pay Geniuses a lot more
- Management teams are hit/ miss (and the managers rotate sometimes across teams, so one manager that you get along with might be in charge of a different team next quarter)

Advice to Senior Management

Communicate more with the team. HIre and promote those who are genuinely more capable and who promote good relationships among the team. If people don't get along well, it affects the entire group in a huge way and it sucks for everyone. But when everyone gets along well, even if they aren't the smartest or most capable, they will have the support of those working with them and things are better for everyone, especially the customer.

Pros

You will work with a lot of fantastic people. Benefits are excellent and customers are, for the most part, great. You will learn a lot, have a lot of fun but probably never go very far. Apple retail is not a career except maybe for managers.

Cons

Managers are unprofessional and not supportive. The company talks about work/life balance but, at least in retail, it is often just talk. Employees gr burned out quickly and leadership lacks direction. Pay is good for retail but this is not traditional retail and for many jobs, salaries are quite low.

Advice to Senior Management

Support your employees. Be professional. Treat everyone the same. Acknowledge that your employees are human and have needs, lives and families. This is too often ignored.

Pros

Fun place to work
Good benefits
Great co-workers

Cons

Management
No work-life balance
Cult-like atmosphere
Very demanding hours
Very strict company policy

Advice to Senior Management

Offer better feedback to employees
Offer better and clearer training

Pros

The name says it all! Amazing job whilst in college; however, the structure of working around your school schedule are long over...very sales driven, more so than customer service.

Cons

Managers can be tools. Especially if they come from Best Buy. They do not understand Apple culture and are ONLY driven by sales not the experience.

Advice to Senior Management

Retail is very minimal, do not expect to grow. It's a good job whilst in college and after college. Use it as a safety in finding another job. This is not Apple corporate so everything is trickled down from the top.

Pros

The benefits package is stellar. There is a stock purchase program that is great because our stock is doing so well, and the health insurance is superb.

Cons

Retail hours suck, and restrict any sort of work-life balance. There is almost no room for advancement from retail, the pinnacle is Genius, Expert, or Creative. After that, it's nearly impossible to go on to management and it is even less likely for someone to go on to corporate.

Advice to Senior Management

Make the stores more appealing to work. Otherwise just keep up the bad job of making it an outwardly cool place to work but not cool once a person has been there for a time.