That's not correct. Apple ended the bag search policy over six years ago and at the time Apple was winning the case. The district court granted Apple's motion for summary judgment and, within two months, Apple ended the policy anyway. It was nearly five years later, and after the issues were considered by a couple of different courts (the Ninth Circuit and the California Supreme Court), that it was effectively decided that Apple had to pay for the time employees spent waiting for searches.
That said, I doubt the amount of additional wages Apple would owe employees was ever the issue for Apple. That amount would seem to have been de minimus. An extra 2 or 3 minutes, on average, per week per employee?
It was most likely a practical issue. How do you effectively have employees clock out after they are searched? The searches had to happen at an exit and employees had to clock out somewhere else. (I recall a picture in one of the court filings showing a computer set up somewhere in the back of a store where employees presumably clocked in and out.) Could employees clock out after they'd left the store? Using their own phones? I don't think that's how it worked. So how could they clock out after they were searched? And, speaking practically, having to walk from the back of the store to an exit (time which was presumably, and without contention, off the clock) might have taken longer than the typical search anyway.
From a PR standpoint, I'd agree that the look here is bad for Apple. But the policy is easy to understand if you think about the practicalities. Maybe Apple should have just automatically added 1 minute per shift to employees' time. That probably would have, at least on average, accounted for the time they spent undergoing searches. If for whatever reason it routinely took longer at certain stores, they could adjust the amount of time automatically added. But Apple's expert testified, in effect, that on average the wait was 30 seconds or less.
