The Coolest Experience I Had as an Apple Store Employee
unretrofied.com
unretrofied.com
The kids went and bought stuff (incl laptops) at multiple stores?
And wasn't there a long line at Apple? How'd they make it to so many other stores?
The kids physically go to the store to buy school computers?
The kids are such good actors that they fooled the author & all other salespeople?
A teacher would actually allow kids to pretend that they're disabled?
No bulk discount or pre-arranged deal?
All other employees in the mall were mean to deaf kids?
Author doesn't remember which Apple product was debuting?
I hate to be "that guy" -- but this story is most likely fiction.
No, but neither did the author so he couldn't tell they were making signs up.
> The kids went and bought stuff (incl laptops) at multiple stores?
No, it just says they browsed other stores.
> And wasn't there a long line at Apple? How'd they make it to so many other stores?
Apple lines are product-specific. If there is a line to buy the new iPhone, you can still go in and buy other products. That is why they manage those lines the way they do.
> The kids physically go to the store to buy school computers?
Sure, why not? Private schools can do things however they want.
> The kids are such good actors that they fooled the author & all other salespeople?
How hard is it to act deaf?
> A teacher would actually allow kids to pretend that they're disabled?
Sure, if the point is to give them a taste of what social interactions feel like to disabled people.
> No bulk discount or pre-arranged deal?
Speaking of unbelievable...this is Apple, right? Not known for their eagerness to cut a deal.
> All other employees in the mall were mean to deaf kids?
Not mean, but maybe not too psyched to have to deal with them.
> Author doesn't remember which Apple product was debuting?
Or maybe they don't want to reveal the exact timing of the story, which naming the product release would do to the day.
> I hate to be "that guy" -- but this story is most likely fiction.
We just had a story on here the other day about a gay couple who found their son in the subway. Life is strange sometimes.
I don't understand why someone would lie about this. For HN karma?
As for a reason why the author would lie, a quick persual of his site makes it pretty clear he is trying to kickstart his career in the Apple blogger niche. Story like this may be a good way to get it started.
I'm sure a bunch of high school students' pretend sign language would be quite easy to spot for a decently intelligent adult, especially if you have to interact with them one by one.
> No, it just says they browsed other stores.
Explains a bit about why other stores were not as nice to them then, if they didn't actually buy anything...
> How hard is it to act deaf?
I'd say pretty damn hard if you were in high school, in a group, on a field trip.
> Speaking of unbelievable...this is Apple, right? Not known for their eagerness to cut a deal.
Apple does give bulk discounts, and if it's for a school I'm sure they should be in a program like that instead of paying retail.
> I don't understand why someone would lie about this.
People just do, for various reasons. Some you may understand, some you may not, but that doesn't change the fact that people do lie (especially for HN karma :P)
A couple walked into my hostel and they were both just beaming these beautiful smiles. They were the kind of people who are just so happy to be on vacation it makes me happy to tell them all of the crazy shit they can enjoy in the city. I stood up and beamed a smile back to them asking them if they were there to check in or if they needed a reservation. They looked at each other, then me, and started to sign.
I panic'd... My mother was friends with a guy who lived in a retirement home because a grenade had taken his eyes in world war two and I often spent time with him and became acquainted with the blind and the nuance of interacting such that we could both make sure we were completely understood, but there have been very few interactions in my life with deaf people and so at this moment in the hostel I was simply unprepared.
The couple saw my panic and laughed and the guy signed using his finger a as a pencil and his other palm as a notebook.
No shit! Write it down. I got us some paper and everything was smooth from there. I got them a room, a deal, and told them where the best place to catch some romance in the city was.
The writer's reaction and feelings toward the interaction mirrored my own quite well. I can believe it, but if it is a fiction, at least it is an accurate one.
I worked for Apple for about three years a while back and served maybe five or six deaf people over that time opting for TextEdit or a small paper pad for communication in all but one of those situations where the customer's daughter came along and translated his signing for me.
I did an experiment similar to this in highschool where we were supposed to go without hearing, sight, or speech for a few days. The specifics are fuzzed but there were a lot of kids walking around with things covering their eyes.
It was a cool little experiment and it sounds like this teacher took it a little further. It also sounds like most good stories that I know, mostly fact but a little fiction in there to spice it up rather than saying... well shit I just don't remember that detail...
It's unfortunate that people are so eager to believe a happy story that they will suppress their bullshit detectors. The truth is important even when the lie is pleasant.
Glad to see this comment is at the top, disappointed to see the story voted so highly in the first place, though.
If pure glurge fiction, it would have ended with the narrator, or more likely the Apple store manager, receiving a note from the school, relating how the deaf kids had been treated poorly at every other store. Better yet, one of the deaf kids would have had a powerful father who went to the Apple store and lavished rewards on all the employees there. Father might even work for Microsoft. Let your imagination run wild.
It's also the part that goes from pushing the boundaries of believability and bursts full on into being obvious fiction.
If you think teachers having kids role play the lives of other people is so crazy as to not have happened, I'm not sure what to tell you. I know that when I was a kid, one of the summer camps I went to did similar things. One year it was just live your day in a wheelchair. Another year it was role-play the lives of a very poor family, and have figure out how to handle a broken arm in one of the kids and still pay rent, eat, etc. These included going out into the world, not just staying in the camp.
I've heard other people who in school had to wear "pregnant suits" or carry "babies", or go around with blindfolds, and so on, to help them understand the situation other people may be in.
Perhaps it's the part where a mall worker runs into someone in another part of the mall later that day. I'm not sure how this even comes close to improbable. I've run into clerks who helped me in the food court before.
Overall, I'd rate this story as Extremely plausible. No single element of it is at all sketchy. Some of the coincidences are less likely to happen, but again, not even deserving of a rating rare, merely unlikely.
If the story teller had a 100 stories like this I would be more suspicious, but a single event that is unlikely is pretty believable.
Additionally, you insist that you don't understand our reasons for skepticism, and bring up total straw men when we have clearly explained our reasons.
I'm not going to sit here and try to convince you that it's bullshit. You clearly don't want to be convinced. You want to believe it. That's fine. Go ahead. But you do an incredibly poor job of being an advocate for the OP.
To me, it's as obvious that he's lying as it is the sky is blue.
As for your "clearly explained reasons", they are as I understand them:
1) the guy was nice oh no!
2) There were some events you've never experienced, therefore must strictly be false.
3) The guy talked about his experiences on his blog - obvious liar, not just telling about his life on a medium heavily used for that.
4) He doesn't remember every detail of something that happened some years ago. You know what. I am certain I don't remember every detail of every thing that happened to me too... sorry this is not even remotely useful criteria.
So, explain to me how the guy is obviously lying based on some pretty weak critera, and some really plausible events.
Right now you are just calling me stupid when I am trying to understand you - this is the type of bullshit that makes me wonder why I would even give credit to your claims. As soon as someone questions them, you claim "you are stupid" instead of explanation. Not a good way of being convincing or practical in an argument.
If this person had actually been working retail during a massive launch and found out these kids had been messing with him on their teacher's orders, the reasonable reaction would have been -- at very least -- "you should be ashamed of yourselves." And being a retail employee during such a shitstorm would almost certainly have precluded that much tact.
True or false, this just is not something a decent person (the teacher) would choose to do, for any of several reasons.
This doesn't mean we should throw them out because they were invented.
It may be fiction, but it certainly has less BS than many true stories.
If this blog post were presented honestly, as a work of fiction, it would never have made it to the top of HN. Nobody would care. Because as fiction it's not interesting.
For the record I do believe it's a true story, even if the details are fuzzy, or maybe some things have been forgotten by the person telling the story.
And to quote my late grandfather: There are no true or false stories, only good ones and bad ones.
The fact that a Mac sales guy was walking back and forth from stockroom to floor, fetching each MacBook for 15 students individually, and no manager took him aside to ask what the hell he thought he was doing, did he not notice that [unidentified product X] had just launched and that the store was full of waiting customers... does not ring true.
His story checks out - I'm happy to answer any other questions re: 5th ave
Also, I imagine real deaf people don't have a habit of walking up to salespeople and assuming they know sign language.
And the guy doesn't remember what product had just launched :)
I feel really sorry for the guy, trying to get attention like this. Pretty desperate.
And what's more, it's taking up the top spot on HN, which could be used for a real story that might have better social justice advice than "don't be a dick".
C'mon.
all it really takes is one kid in the group knowing sign language. It is actually not that uncommon since it counts as a second language and there has been a bit of a craze to teach babies to sign. It also clusters around deaf children since their friends tend to pick up sign[1].
1) remember children, signing to your friend at church still counts as talking during the mass
ed: woop my bad, you covered that
Paying $30K - $50K a year in tuition fees should do it.
Once when I worked in bookstore a man came into the store and faked being deaf. My coworkers and I jumped through all kinds of hoops to accommodate him and spent a lot of time writing notes back and forth to help this customer find a particular type of book he said he was looking for. After half an hour of scribbled notes, fetching books from the stacks, and iterating towards what he was describing the man bust out laughing and declared "Hahaha! I'm not actually deaf!!" and walked out without buying anything.
I felt stupid and annoyed that he had wasted so much of our time. Not only did that man's behavior distract us from other legitimate customers, the experience left me feeling guarded about whether to accept people at face value. I never encountered any other customers with hearing disability while I was at that job, but I'm sure I would have had skepticism from this hoax experience in the back of my mind as I tried to help them.
You are not helping anyone by pretending to have a disability.
First off, they each bought a MacBook, so catering to them was hardly a waste of time. Secondly, I feel like exercising one's empathy is always a good thing, especially during those extremely formative high school years.
Of course, it's very easy to dismiss another person's life circumstances (disabled or not) in passing. So, actually being treated differently as a result of changing your behavior can open up a world of insight about human nature. This article makes me wonder how I would've felt about having the same experience (as one of the students) when I was in high school.
The author noted that there was a "troublemaker" and that the kids were "mostly friendly", so maybe some of the students were of the same mindset as the guy who tricked you. Perhaps the article was sugarcoated quite a bit, but even so.
Pretending to have a disability solely to cultivate empathy can certainly be beneficial for one's social life. Maybe it's not the best way to exercise empathy, but I don't think it hurts.
That was fun...
24/7 Apple Store. They're doing god's work.
Upon moving from such a place to the suburbs of DC, I was dismayed to find that finding a store open at 3am was actually more difficult than in the hinterlands.
1) and what unholy foolishness of closing offsale at 8pm on weekdays, 9pm Fri and Sat, and closed all day Sun. WTF? "Backwards" ND has Sunday offsale.
Thanksgiving, in the US, has more market penetration than Christmas. Yet, there's the huge Black Friday shopping thing, so stores pay people extra to set up on Thursday too.
"Only in America do you celebrate being thankful for everything you have on Thursday so you can go buy more shit on Friday" -Some wise netizen (a paraphrase).
Apple salespeople are not paid on commission, and since the guy was told exactly what the students were buying and that they already had the money distributed to them on gift cards, he knew he couldn't upsell them on a warranty or in-store training. Selling a baseline macbook is easy, people line up to buy them. It is the upselling that determines an employee's performance. So I don't think it had any bearing on this guy's behavior.
This matters a lot, consistent negative reviews are one of the few things that can get you fired.
- AppleCare %- This is the extended warranty apple offers. This is emphasized pretty hard, managers frequently cite studies that show higher satisfaction for people who buy warranties etc. The official target for this is 50%, but getting over 20% puts you in the top tier, and anything below 10% gets you negative attention. Store average was around 13-17%. Its pretty rare you actually changes someone's mind on buying it, most people come in decided.
- 1 to 1 % - this is % of computers you sell with one to one, which is a year of as-many-as-you-want hour longs training sessions on basic computer stuff. A 6% 1 to 1 rate was outstanding and over 10% was unheard of, but official corporate expectation was 25%
- Sales $
- personal setup % - how many people you can get to sit with an apple employee and be walked through setup of iDevice.
While I was at Apple, they were pretty good about just letting you do whatever you felt was best for the customer. There's was never any pressure to force a sale, and you were encouraged to talk to customers for as long as they wanted.
source: I worked at 5th ave, Apple's busiest US retail store for 6 months in 2011-2012. The store gets over 50% international customers (who often can't use the warranties/upsells in their home countries) so %ages may be drastically different from other stores.
However, on a larger scale, I would tend to agree that stores that sell expensive things hire better salesmen.
In the low end/mall type environment, look at In-N-Out or Chick-Fil-A vs. a badly-run Arby's franchise. Essentially the same product, but different culture. (McDonald's is even more interesting; they have great systems and generally hire younger or less experienced and more short-term workers, but don't seem to be as happy as the other places. McDonald's does do a great job of hiring disabled people, though -- and for a McDonald's job, a developmentally disabled person who is motivated and happy and has worked there 5 years is probably going to be a far better employee than a normal high schooler who is bitter about having to work.)
Generally "better" stores have higher margins, but not always higher prices -- Trader Joe's and Whole Foods both beat Safeway as a place to work.
If I lived in Iowa, I'd love to work for a place like Brownell's or in Colorado, Magpul, even for a lower wage than a company with less-good internal culture.
Also if I was a student, knowing this experiment wouldn't affect my grades at all, I'd be rebelling against this forced lie and talking out loud "accidentally".
So it's comparing Apples with common everyday oranges. (Pun indended)
Having said that, Apple is pretty well known for offering great customer service, even when it's clear you're not purchasing anything.
Just an FYI. I don't know that the innate economics of Apple are any different.
(Although the absolute best deals I've found on cars have been deployed military BMW/Audi sales programs)
There was a break in the presentation, after which I decided I was going to bail. I took my phone, a Blackberry at the time, out of my pocket as I exited the door so that I could check if anything was going on at work.
As I took those first few steps outside, I accidentally dropped my phone.
It wasn't one of those gentle drops. In the process of trying to catch it before it hit the ground, I ended up pushing it with even greater velocity downwards. It hit the concrete pretty hard and a mix of phone, battery cover, and battery went skittering across the concrete walkway.
Three Apple Store employees were sitting outside, also on break. My phone had gone flying right past their feet.
"Oooh!" they said with a wince.
Then one of them said, "Don't worry everyone! It wasn't a IPhone!"
And they laughed.
And that was it. I picked up the parts of my phone, took at a look at the damage, put it back together, and walked away.
There was no offer of help or concern, but they thought it was pretty funny.
Fortunately, the phone survived pretty well off. There really wasn't anything more than minor scratches, despite how I had practically thrown the phone against the concrete.
Ironically, had it been an IPhone (or any modern touchscreen phone), it would have probably been destroyed. I ended up destroying the screen on my Nexus One a year or two later with a much less violent drop.
And, I'm afraid to say, most of my other experiences with Apple store employees here in Arizona has been pretty similar. We regularly have our helpdesk staff go in to pick up parts and do repair runs and I've had to call up our regular Apple rep and comment on bad attitudes, poor service, and outright rejection of service on in-warranty breakages for whatever reason-of-the-day they could make up.
The story linked to is important: You really can make a lasting impression on a customer that they will never forget, positive or negative.
I will never forget the way three Apple Store employees laughed at me as I dropped my phone.
While it's nice when someone is reasonable and polite but it doesn't magically make up for the other 100 people who acted like I don't have the right to get on the bus.
During a lull I wrote up a quick briefing of everything I would usually say and go over on my laptop. When it came time to jump I greeted the student, smiled and then had them read the text while I geared them up. Them I made a big show of pantomiming everything we'd be doing while we laughed and conversed on the laptop.
It was a lot of fun :)
I will also point out that retail sales staff get a lot more exposure to anyone and everyone than your average hacker does. One can become jaded and perhaps impatient fairly quickly. Should you? No, maybe not. But it's Friday, your feet hurt, and some kid is social engineering you. Do you feel as if you need that?
And gave me a neat startup idea I'm working on ;)
Also, wow, please don't map "escape" to cause navigation on your website. That's super annoying.
"Wow, I really didn't expect this story to blow up the way it has. I've never had anything voted up on Hacker News before, much less gain the top spot. I'm still not convinced it hasn't all been a fever-dream."
which just supports the hypothesis that he's just bullshitting everybody.
The story looks a little weird, even not true, like I don't quite remember which product had just released that morning,, is it true?
But at the end, I found I was misunderstood and also was touched.
You clearly win.
All the students received a MAC from the school.
The author doesn't have any comments on his blog.
It's fiction, this dude is lying like hell :-s
I would guess that this is something more like a 20-kid Montessori school, than a regular big-building public institution. The kind where there's one teacher (who does things like run field trips as sociological object lessons), and no IT staff to speak of, but which has a big budget nevertheless due to the high tuition cost of private education paid by the (rich) parents.
Seriously? You work at an apple store, it was supposedly your most memorable experience, and you don't remember what product was being released? It's not like they have hundreds of products. Sounds fishy.
I went to a private catholic high school in a small city. The administration trusted the students. They also didn't have IT staff, so geek speaking technobabble sounds better than paying actual staff. Walked out of high school with independent study classes, real experience in IT and building control systems, and without my parents paying expensive tuition.