“When I started with the company, it felt like the only number that they worried about was your customer service score,” he says, referring to survey results about consumers’ satisfaction. Kevin Gallagher, who’s spent seven years at the Towson store, says he’s seen the shift happen. While Apple has always used data to assess performance, employees say, which metrics it cares most about and the tactics it uses to boost them have changed dramatically. “You have to focus on your numbers being perfect.” “The tree pushed people to want to upsell,” says staffer Tyra Reeder. The labels included the customer’s name and the device’s serial number, so managers could verify them. The upsell treeĪt a store in Towson, Maryland, for example, management put up a giant laminated photo of a tree in the break room and told Genius Bar workers to add a stick-on label every time they made a sale. Some stores email workers’ stats to colleagues or post them on the wall in employee-only areas, with those of lower sellers highlighted in red. They’re also evaluated based on how many customers pay for an extended warranty through the AppleCare program and how many people they deal with per hour. They’re pushed to prioritise “ownership opportunities,” the company’s euphemism for persuading people to buy new gadgets instead of repairing their old ones. Workers say that whereas the focus of an Apple Genius used to be to impress customers with a high level of service, they and other employees are now increasingly pressured to upsell. Apple’s retail jobs have started to feel a lot more like, well, retail jobs. Bloombergīehind the scenes, though, things have changed, as interviews with dozens of Apple Store employees across nine cities make clear. The company claims its stores are “destinations”. To this day, strangers flag down off-duty Geniuses for help wherever they see Apple’s signature blue T-shirt.Īpple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York. In at least one case, captured this spring in a viral TikTok, a dedicated employee taught a coding class to an audience of zero, hoping someone would show up to learn. Genius Bar staffers have generally been trusted to solve your problems, to fix your phone if they could, to replace certain busted headphones for free. There’s enough white light and open space to make you think you’re walking through a literal Consumer Heaven.Īnd, of course, there’s the Genius Bar, a help centre that for most of the past two decades has felt like something of a personal concierge service fuelled by a small army of friendly, helpful nerds. White-oak tables in neat rows welcome you beneath a gleaming Apple logo, the same one you’d see at the store along the Champs-Elysées or in the shadow of the Burj Khalifa. The Apple Store where you’ll do some holiday shopping this year looks the same as always.
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