[newZWhoDis]

I worked Apple Retail many many moons ago. The senior manager once told me (manager -> senior manager -> store leader)

“Your job is not to sell products, we could put all this inventory out there on a pallet with a credit card swiper and sell all of them. Your job is to sell attachments, primarily Apple Care”.

Seriously, sales volume was a footnote. You are entirely judged on your attach rate for whatever it is corporate/your market is pushing, they start you part time and the only way up is to attach attach attach. No one wants to “just sell you a phone” because they know you’ll never get Apple Care and for every one of you they need to sell 4 other people on AC to get their numbers back up.

Another fun note: At the time Apple Store revenue $/sq ft beat out jewelry stores.

Great gig as a high school kid, made decent cash and a bunch of people used their tuition assistance. A large number of their employees though are what I call “retail lifers”, 25-30 year olds who are way in debt from a degree that didn’t work out or washed out of the corporate world and landed back in retail. They really don’t like younger employees who are actually going somewhere/realize it’s a temporary gig for kids and not a real career. Lots of alcoholism and drug abuse in that group.

[wisty]

If that's still the case, I can imagine why they'd want a customer who knows exactly what they want to walk to the store next door to get the item elsewhere.

A customer who already knows exactly what configuration they want is probably going to be hard to sell AppleCare to.