Former Apple Store Manager tells how the company stopped innovating in retail

Next month, then Apple's head of retail, Angela Ahrendts, leaving the company after five years leading the company's stores around the world. Who occupies the senior vice president of retail chair being the current VP of people Deirdre OBrien, which has not yet made any statement about the future of Apple Stores.

Regardless of what is in OBrien's plans, the fact that, starting in April, Ma's stores will not necessarily maintain the same characteristics; After all, each different leadership and certain practices are constantly evaluated. However, for a former Apple manager, over the years these changes have distanced Apple Stores from their goal: innovation.

The former employee told ZDNet that the best "era" of the Apple Store happened under the leadership of Ron Johnson, the company's first retail chief (2000-2011). According to him, this period was when Ma's stores saw significant growth and introduced, notoriously, the biggest news in the retail environment.

At that time, Apple's retail mission was simply to "do whatever it took to please a customer." He said the company's philosophy was that its products "were so good and innovative that they would literally fly off the shelves and people's wallets would open to buy them."

Some time after the “golden age” came depression. According to the former employee of the company, it was during the brief leadership (April to October 2012) of the British John Browett It's one of Tim Cook's first signings that Ma's stores went through the first big "crisis."

That was the dark period of the Middle Ages. It was the first, and as far as I know, the only time Apple fired a number of retail employees, increased available hours and prioritized revenue generation rather than the mission of making customers happy.

Then, habemus Ahrendts Revered in the fashion world, Ma's chief retailer was managing to have a positive effect on the company's store operations. The former official explained that Ahrendts wanted these places to be, in addition to retail outlets, places for artistic and educational meetings.

In fact, the executive has achieved this goal in some retail units around the world; however, the effect of these changes was uncertain. He reported that while Ahrendts is more likely to have left Apple on his own, she was not "universally" worshiped.

Angela Ahrendts should be the "Renaissance" she never was. We were following conflicting orders on a semi-regular basis and a lot of new initiatives that seemed to follow a weekly basis. Nothing seemed to materialize, however.

As a result, sales and people volume was declining at Apple Stores, while targets continued to increase for all employees. This has placed store managers (as the anonymous source of ZDNet) an immense pressure. For the former employee, Apple "went from being a breakthrough retail company to a little more like everyone else."

We were suddenly being tracked based on how many “exceptions” we were making to customers – a discretionary discount or the removal of a repair fee or cost.

These comments are, of course, only representative and indicate the position of a former Ma employee about all Apple Store operations. In any case, the upcoming projects and directions that the company's stores will take under OBrien's leadership could change (and greatly) Apple's current retail format.

via Cult of Mac