Update: Apple has issued a statement to BuzzFeed News regarding this incident:
“Inclusion and diversity are among Apple’s core values. We believe in equality for everyone, regardless of race, age, gender, gender identity, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. That applies throughout our company, around the world with no exceptions. We’ve looked into the details of the situation and we apologise to the customers involved. We will continue to do everything in our power to ensure all our customers are treated the way they should be.”
The manager of an Apple Store in Australia has apologised after six teenagers aged 15 and 16 were asked to leave the store when a member of staff expressed concerns than they might steal something. The youths allege that their ejection from the store in Melbourne’s Highpoint Shopping Centre (pictured above at its grand opening) was due to the color of their skin. The teens were born in Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, Eritrea and Egypt before emigrating to Australia as children.
A video shows a member of the store staff stating that security staff were “concerned about your presence in our store, worried that you might steal something.”
Apple told Mashable that it was investigating the incident, and the BBC later reported that the store manager had apologized to the teens, and that this apology had been accepted.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CHftBRuSr8]
CEO Tim Cook has said that diversity is crucial to Apple’s future, the company issuing an annual report on gender and ethnicity in its workforce. The latest data, published back in August, showed small increases in minority hiring, with black employees increasing from 7% to 8% and Asian staff up from 15% to 18%. Cook said he is proud of the progress the company has made but “we know there is a lot more work to be done.”
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I’d tell them to shove their apology up their ass.
Unbelievable
I smell a firing in the air!
Always know about the brand you buy.The apple CEO doesn’t sound very apologetic,and the report echoes his lousy apology!
How would you know if he is “very apologetic” or not?
Apple CEO has sent email to all employees addressing this issue. Those kind of actions are individual from some “stupid” employees who don’t know the real values of Apple and how to live these values. You can’t blame the whole company for someone’s mistake, everybody does mistakes.
I haven’t seen any other company that care most about the diversity and environment as Apple.
Ok… but where’s the “REST” of the video? Why are these videos always cut short and only display convenient snippets of the story?
What happened before this? What was said after this?
And why is that guys shirt grey? Looks like mall security to me, not an Apple employee. If that’s the case… why was mall security called? Was there any shopping behavior happening that may have caused Loss prevention to be concerned. And again… why is the video conveniently cut?
I want the truth “THE WHOLE TRUTH” and nothing but… not the little snippets of video put on the internet leaving people to potentially assume things incorrectly.
An apology means nothing if the offending parties still work there.
Would there have been the same degree of incident if all the group had been white ?
And here i thought anything was possible with Apple store in a good way until now…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo2p82aTQzo
Heh, that’s hilarious
Far too little in the video to make an accurate assessment of what occurred. It does look suspicious – but hardly enough for an indictment. But that doesn’t stop the mob rule of social media form acing as DA, judge, jury, and executioner.
Aside from the issue at the Aussie store, this article is used as yet another vehicle to highlight Apple’s “lack of diversity” re: hiring. The bottom line is that no person deserves a job due to their heritage or skin color. Furthermore, stating that any company is not hiring fairly based solely on who they have already hired is ridiculous. Stats showing the race breakdown of persons already hired describes ZERO with regard to what was available in the workforce at the time of hiring. What’s next??? Hire a white person but then fire them when a person of color becomes available solely because you want a non-white working rather than a white? How is that not racist??? What’s worse – it’s racism based on nothing more than white guilt run amok after being told time and time again they should feel guilty due to “white privilege” – a term that, by the way, is easily as insulting to a white person as the N-word is to a black.
As with most things in life, there is only one relevant criteria for hiring someone – MERIT – MERIT – MERIT.
Believe me, if there are persons of color that can do any job as good as or even better that whites, then by all means hire them all day long but only as long as it is done BASED ON MERIT – NOT COLOR. And if whites can’t compete, then too bad – do better. But I will never support (nor should anybody) an ideal that says hire a non-white because there is a non-white who is unemployed. Racism is racism regardless of the target…and if you wanna end it, then simply put…
STOP BEING RACIST
PS: To all those white affirmative action supporter types out there – trust me when I say you will sing a drastically different tune when you lose out on a job solely because you’re white…being displaced for being nothing more than how you were born is quite a sobering thing.