Confessions of an Apple Store Employee

Things like this are always interesting and worth a reading session in Instapaper. An anonymous Apple Store employee talked to Popular Mechanics, detailing some of the little known facts about Apple’s retail environment. Some juicy bits below.

About product launches:

We are completely in the dark until they do a keynote speech. We have no idea what is coming and are not allowed to openly speculate.

On MobileMe’s popularity:

We’re supposed to sell AppleCare product support with just about everything, and honestly, those aren’t that hard to sell, since they aren’t a bad deal. But we’re also supposed to push MobileMe, and that’s really hard to sell. Nobody ever sells it.

The weird part about Apple’s philosophy:

Sometimes the company can feel like a cult. Like, they give us all this little paper pamphlet, and it says things like—and I’m paraphrasing here—“Apple is our soul, our people are our soul.” Or “We aim to provide technological greatness.” And there was this one training session in which they started telling us how to work on our personality, and separating people into those with an external focus and an internal focus. It was just weird.

Read the full interview here.