Macenstein

Anyone who’s ever had to bring their Mac in for service has experienced that moment of trepidation before handing the machine over… “Is there anything on my computer I’d be embarrassed if someone saw?” you wonder. Well, speaking as someone who has nothing BUT embarrassing things on their laptop, I’ll guess the answer is “yes”. From an e-mail with your registration information to AshleyMadison.com to your Barbara Streisand collection to an inappropriate iChat conversation with a minor, we all have something we’d prefer to keep the repair technician’s eye’s off of (for the record, I’m 80% sure I have none of those on my computer…). Well, faithful Macenstein reader “Mr. F”, a former Apple Store employee of two years, has decided to give us a little insight into the inner workings of the Apple Store, and it turns out you might want to think twice about hiding your sensitive info next time your Mac needs a tune up.

How to get a discount

The Doc: “OK, so first up, what’s the best way to get a discount on a Mac?”
Mr. F.: “Well, it might sound obvious, but the most important thing, by far, is to be nice. If you act like a know-it-all, or you’re condescending, I’ll be less willing to help you out. That said, the student discount is your best bet, even if you’re 80. You can say you are buying the Mac for your grandkid or child if you are obviously not a student. I was generally pretty trusting.”

“If you’re older, tell me it’s for your grandkid attending college, and I’ll probably just give you the discount outright if my manager says OK (which was almost 100% of the time). But if I could tell a customer was lying, I usually offered them a student discount on a Mac with the stipulation that they buy AppleCare as well, which still came out less than the Mac alone, plus they get AppleCare out of the deal. There’s actually a fair amount of pressure to sell the “attachments” (AppleCare, onetoone, MobileMe), or at least there was in my day. I hear it’s been toned down recently, but my immediate bosses encouraged it, off the record, so giving out student discounts was OK as long as you bundled one of the attachments as well. The guy in charge of multiple stores (whose title I can’t remember) would not encourage it, though. He was a very by-the-book military man. Just a quick aside – onetoone is actually a really really good deal…with a new computer, it’s $79 for a year of lessons, which is a steal in my opinion. If you use all of them, it’s 52 lessons….that’s a little over a dollar a lesson. But Apple makes a ton of money on it, because stats show that a huge majority of onetoone subscribers only use 2-3 sessions a year.

The Doc: ” So, what’s in it (pushing the attachments) for the Apple Store employee? ”
Mr. F.: “Nothing, really. The managers get a bonus, though. I think Apple used to give Specialists commission at one point, but that was before I worked there. If we did really well, we got some silly award at the store meetings from the company”. [The Doc: “Such as?”] “(laughs) A little piece of paper–a certificate. I think once they gave out some cool accessories, but that was when I first started working there, so I didn’t get any myself. Basically, the better you do, the better the chance is that you’ll be promoted. But, in reality, even if you get promoted to Genius or Creative, chances of being promoted to manager are very slim. Chances of being promoted beyond that are even slimmer. Apple has a very streamlined managerial hierarchy. Between me and Steve Jobs were only 5 levels: it went manager, store manager, regional manager, VP of Retail (Ron Johnson), Steve.”

The Doc: “Wow. So you must be rolling in stock options!” 🙂
Mr. F: “I think with the employee purchase plan, I accumulated 2 options over the 2 years. I was working there back when the stock was up in the high 100’s.”

The Doc: “So, what’s the weirdest request for a discount you received?”
Mr. F: “Not to stereotype, but we have a lot of Russian people where I live, and I could always tell when they were trying to pull one over on me. They love to haggle. When they were legitimately parents of students, they ALWAYS had letters of acceptance/id cards in tow. Always. When they weren’t, they used every trick in the book to get me a discount.

“I once had a really old Israeli lady try to haggle with me on Black Friday. ‘If I pay kyeash, can I get no tax?’ I was like, ‘This isn’t an orange stand, Miss. I have no control over the price.’ She didn’t get the joke and, after some more explanation, accepted the price.

Crazy Customers

The Doc: “So, what are some of the more bizarre customers you’ve had to deal with?”
Mr. F.: “On the original iPhone launch day, there was a 2-phone-per-person limit. A guy brought his baby in and claimed it was a “person” so he could buy two more. He argued with me for a while, threatened to tell the newspaper reporter who was there. We ended up just selling them to him. It wasn’t worth the argument. We had hundreds of other customers to serve. Despite that, we were one of the only stores to not sell out, actually, which was funny because the two kids who were first in line sold their spots for 800 dollars, went to the back of the line, and bought iPhones and all the accessories they wanted – they just had to wait an extra hour or two to do so.”

“I’ve also actually had many older women try to set me up with their daughters.”

The Doc: “Ever take them up on it?”
Mr. F.: (laughs) “I’ve thought about it, but the daughters don’t usually go for it. They don’t trust their mothers’ advice.”

The Doc: “Any other customers stick out in your memory?”
Mr. F.: “Well, I wouldn’t call him a ‘customer’, but we had this really smelly homeless dude come in for like two weeks straight playing Pinochle on Yahoo before people started complaining. The smell notwithstanding, he was a nice guy: it was sad for me to see him go. My manager was less sympathetic.”

Oh, the things the Geniuses see

The Doc: “So, you mentioned that the Geniuses occasionally come across some interesting stuff. Care to share?”
Mr. F.: “Well, as you might expect, Geniuses have found porn… a lot. We had one old gay guy who had an insane amount of gay porn on his iPod. He had 3 onetoone subscriptions, so he was in all the time… and he was loaded, so he bought every new product, whether or not he needed it. I got hit on by him too. If I learned one thing at the Apple Store, it was that mothers and gay dudes love me.”

“We also got a lot of people who had obviously damaged their gear and were trying to claim it wasn’t their fault. I remember one guy came in with his iPod nano which was all melted on top. He told us he just had it plugged in and it melted spontaneously, but the burns were clearly external, and not even in the place where it’d be normally burnt. The guy likely left it by the toaster oven or something.”

“Another girl came in with an extremely cracked screen. I’m not talking about a little hairline crack, or even one big one. I’m talking about clearly-stepped-on-or-hit-with-a-sledgehammer cracked. She whined and whined and whined, but to no avail. Moral of the story: don’t whine. It doesn’t help, especially if the damage is clearly your fault.”

The Doc: “So, when a Genius finds something crazy on someone’s laptop or iPod, does the news spread around the store and everyone comes and looks, or he just tells you later?”
Mr. F: ” It depends on the severity. I was really close friends with one of them, so he’d tell me everything sooner or later. I mean, if it were really crazy, he’d tell me right away, but it would usually take a bit to filter through the store. We do work, you know.”

The Doc: “So, how much “poking around” are the Geniuses really supposed to do? For example, if you bring in a laptop to get some RAM, is all they’re supposed to do just boot it up and see that it runs and maybe that the System Profiler says it sees the RAM? Or are they supposed to launch apps to verify it functions?”
Mr. F.: “Yeah, they just boot it and check System Profiler. They’re generally very busy. Usually when they find something embarrassing, it’s because it’s left somewhere super obvious – they’re probably not digging. I mean, it’s not like Geek Squad – we don’t snoop as much as it seems like they do. Again, though, if it’s obvious, we’re gonna tell the whole store about that shit. And we’ll laaaaaugh and laugh. So hide your porn!