Are you implying this isn't important or impactful because he's a low-level employee?
My point is not that it is less "important or impactful" but that working within a retail environment vs a corporate environment - even at Apple - is an apples / oranges comparison.
Apple has effectively the highest retail employee retention rate full in the USA (1) - they have led the charge in changing the retail paradigm for the better for 10s of thousands of employees.
My first job was retail and I would have killed to work at an Apple store.
Petty bosses wielding a 100 page HR rule-book that some back closet McKinsey intern produced to fire anybody at anytime (even in states w/good protections) is PAR for the course in retail.
Is it because corporate is evil or because managing a largely lower-education(2), transient workforce is incredibly challenging?
Is it nuanced and two sided? of course!
Did this maybe happen at an Apple Store?
It might have!
Could it have been a manager looking for an HR dept defensible excuse to get rid of a difficult employee?
Could just likely have been.
(1) https://www.hrzone.com/community/blogs/mark-mccormack/apple-...
(2) https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/industry-at-a-glan...
- This post is front paged on HN, grabbing your attention, mine, and a demographic that skews largely to Apple's core corporate HR need and customer base.
- It is important that the HN community can rely on the comments section to gain insight or nuance that they would not otherwise have from the source material.
- The author works to harm Apple's reputation as an employer and company suggesting one stops buying their products and opt out of their ecosystem etc.
- This central argument, that Apple is an unfair and malicious employer, is in conflict with Apple's objectively industry leading employee retention numbers that I share above.
- The author never discloses that he is/was a retail employee vs. a corporate employee which I think anybody with an understanding of retail employment in general would appreciate to have as a filter to assess his pov.
- Without taking a position of this termination being right or wrong, the evidence above suggests this is an edge-case and is probably not deserving of my or my fellow HN users taking into deep consideration in our opinion of Apple.
- Instead it feels like a well timed piece of negative content that fits into a narrative that several very large and powerful corporations are working hard to try in the court of public opinion. (1)
- - -
And then back to your comment - what lesson or theme are you drawing from a single retail employees one-sided negative experience working within the Apple employee ecosystem? What am I missing? Why is this relevant?
(1) https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/17/21372480/apple-epic-threa...