Stop posting these articles in this sub
They weren’t…… fear…… 10 years ago?
If you want to work for Apple, work in a corporate capacity or adjacent to them. The retail store roles are ridiculously underpaid relative to the work required, with the possible exception of store leader and above (which are considered corporate positions).
I never worked harder for less money than when I was a Mac genius which topped out around $22/hour when I left in ‘14. Fast forward 10 years; Mac system admin, Jamf 400, $135k, full time remote. They fly me in about once a year for meetings and I attend Ignite and JNUC with some of my team.
I worked at the cube for 5 years but I’m pretty far removed now (2010-2015) and at that time Apple retail was the ugly stepchild of Apple, Inc. yes it was better but than other retail gigs, but the bar is so low amongst retail already.
Couple examples related to wages were that retail’s paycheck week was Saturday to Friday, so you could work more than 5 days in a row (FT) and not get any overtime because 5 of those days were in one pay cycle and the other days were in another pay cycle, so you’d not get OT. My longest stretch was 8 days in a row.
Another piece was vacation accrual. Yes you could earn time off at a higher rate over time, but it would take you 5 years in retail to reach the same accrual rate as an Apple corporate employee would in 2 years.
In terms on safety, it was usually ok. But I remember once there was think smoke coming out of the elevator and while the FDNY was called, management made no effort to stop people coming in, let alone evacuating the people already in there.
But hey we had a pretty dope staircase.
It only got worse, worked at 2017-2022.