New York Times profiles Apple’s retail operations and employees

The New York Times has published a lengthy profile on Apple’s Retail operations, describing Apple retail employee pay in comparison to the company’s overall revenues from its retail chain. Controversially, Apple paints the average Apple retail worker as underpaid, comparing the average employee’s $25,000 per year salary against an average $473,000 per year made for Apple by each retail employee and Tim Cook’s large stock grants.

Although this is what the NYT seems to initially depict, they then backtrack and say that Apple pays above the average for retailers. In addition, Apple offers benefits to employees such as money towards college tuitions, gym memberships, a 401k plan, health care, major product discounts, and opportunities to buy stock at lower prices.

On top of this, as we reported, new Apple Senior Vice President of Retail has moved up the planned late September retail employee raises to late this month. Several employees have already been informed of their raises, with some employees seeing up to 30% more money. The report also notes some interesting Apple retail tidbits:

• Apple managers tell new employees that they would like to see six years of work from them
• Internal surveys of Genius Bar workers point to work dissatisfaction
• However, Apple says Genius Bar worker retention year-to-year is over 90%. This is “unheard-of in the retail industry”
• Apple employees don’t find “upward mobility” opportunities in the company due to a small amount of available retail positions and the rare move to corporate work.
• Apple decided against worker commissions even before the first Apple Store opened. The decision was made because Apple did not want to create competition between employees, something that Apple felt would hurt the retail operations.

The entire NYT report is a worth a read and provides comprehensive insight into the Apple retail employee.