24 hours after Samsung opened a store in the same street as Apple, a shocking expose has revealed allegations of corruption and “dirty secrets” among Apple shop employees.
Former staff has described how shrines were created to “whining” customers.
There are allegations that Apple staff who parade in colours similar to Samsung’s corporate colours deliberately broke customers’ iPhones if the customer was deemed to have been rude to Apple staff.
Another allegation is based on an Apple store manager trading heavily discounted Apple products to a plastic surgeon in return for a stomach-stapling procedure.
The informants claimed that Apple staff smashed their iPhones at alcohol-fuelled parties just to see how many replacements they could squeeze out of the Apple stockroom.
US publication Gizmodo, who broke the story about the behaviour of Apple staff at their Dallas store, has even posted images of a”whinging” customer shrine.
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The tell-all article expose has blown the lid on the squeaky clean image that Apple likes to portray for their stores.
According to Gizmodo magazine, which interviewed two former ‘Genius’ Apple employees, identified as ‘Jake’ and ‘Ronald’, behind-the-scenes at the store was a hotbed of corruption.
The Daily Mail claims that a former Apple executive ran the store as if it was her personal playground.
“She was notorious for pulling favours for businesses in the community who didn’t want to play by Apple’s rules,” Jake told Gizmodo. “She made quid pro quo an art.”
Eventually, the female manager was ousted for reportedly ‘unfair hiring practices,’ playing favourites, and ‘questionable activities surrounding use of store services’.
Genius squad members revealed that if customers were rude to them, they would get back at them by breaking their hardware.
Apple management were not the only ones breaking the rules. Ronald admitted that he and his co-workers on the Genius squad would shamelessly exploit Apple’s once lax return and exchange policy to get new phones whenever they pleased by making false transactions.
“It bends my brain to know that, statistically speaking, it’s harder to get a job at the Apple Store than it is to get into some Ivy League schools,” Jake said.
“Yet somehow they’re staffed by some of the most inept people this side of mastering the ability to speak.”
Sometimes they would purposely smash their iPhones at alcohol-fuelled parties just to see how many replacements they could squeeze out of the Apple stockroom.
But it was not just the off-site parties where the booze flowed freely.
“It’s not uncommon for the Genius team to be drunk,” Jake noted, adding that Apple employees working the night shift at a call centre in a nearby town would routinely do cocaine on the job.
Beside exploiting their company’s policies to score free hardware and working while inebriated, Jake and Ronald have revealed that members of the Genius squad would get back at particularly rude or annoying costumers by destroying their devices, simply because they were being ‘a*******’.
“Ive used someone else’s hard drive as a skateboard cause he told the store I smelled,” Ronald said in a text message.
And there was little the customers could do about their damaged property because the employees would give them a form to sign according to which they were not responsible for data loss.
Gizmodo has reported that since releasing the expose, several other former workers of the Dallas store, identified by the Dallas Morning News, have come forward to corroborate the claims made by Jake and Ronald, who are no longer employed by Apple.
