An Apple a Day. Working at the Apple Store

I personally love Apple, the Apple store, the Apple merchandise, the Apple everything and don't find much of what Adrian Chen writes in the part of the article I quoted below, objectionable. I love Apple so much, I will be adopting some of the linguistic suggestions Apple makes to their staff for my own daily use.

Excellent article
Enjoy!


"Working at the Apple Store: Tales from the Inside
By Adrian Chen

The bright, friendly facade of the Apple store hides some weird stuff, according to current and former employees. Porn-stuffed laptops, positivity police, and an anti-gossip gestapo: Welcome to the real Apple Store.
After the Wall Street Journal published an account of Apple's retail culture that was as sterile and cheery as Apple Stores themselves, we asked insiders to send us more colorful details about hawking Steve Jobs' pricey chunks of metal. And Apple Store employees had some tales to tell. Here's a selection.

Apple employees are banned from saying "unfortunately" when delivering bad news to a customer, urged instead to replace it with the more positive "as it turns out." And management apparently takes the ban seriously: One former Apple employee tells us that his coworker was put under a 90-day probationary period because he said "unfortunately" too much at the Genius Bar.

As it turns out, "unfortunately" is just one of a number of "stop words" that are not supposed to pass an Apple Store employee's lips. One Apple Store employee, who was fired in 2009 after two years, writes:

There was a whole class we took about things not to say, and what to say instead. One of my favorites was to resist the urge to say "That's stupid" or "That wasn't smart" and replace it with "That's not recommended" - For example, you say "I took my iPod swimming and now it don't work" I say "Ah, that's not recommended" when I mean "That was really stupid".

Also, problems aren't "problems"—they're "issues."

The linguistic whitewashing extends to relations between management and employees. One former employee who worked at an Apple store in New York City last summer says:

Managers were instructed to use specific buzz words and phrases when speaking to us. For example, "I'll reach out to you" was a good one. I would often get "reached out to" to attend mandatory store meetings. Even better was the phrase "what questions do you have," instead of "do you have any questions." They use the former because it's supposed to sound more open and welcome to questions. I just thought it sounded scripted. They used it a lot in the training program- I called them out on it and got a lecture on how to communicate with others.

Given some of the crazy bullshit employees have to deal with from their customers, we'd imagine it must be hard to keep up the act. An Apple Store employee of two years who worked as a tech support specialist and quit within the last two months writes:

The amount of porn I saw in data transfers blew my mind. Once a guy got a detractor because a customer blamed US for the fact that, when our tools transferred the data of their old computer over and put photos in iPhoto, there were hoards of gay pornography brought over. She couldn't possibly believe that maybe it was her 70-year old husband's doing. Yeah, because we put porn on your shit for fun, ma'am. No, I saw people get fired just for LOOKING in the photo albums of customer's computers to verify that, yes, the pictures had transferred. Not even trying to actually get into someone's personal stuff, just doing our job and making sure nothing had failed to transfer (because customers got angry if anything was missing).

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