I've worked retail, but not at an Apple store. (And not in many years.) A good friend of mine is a manager at a local mall Apple Store. He can't talk about things corporate, and in courtesy we don't expect him to any more than he expects me to discuss my clients' business. But during the times we talk "shop" in general, from what I can glean, the Apple Store retail work experience is overall good for its worker demographic, far better than some, better than many, and not as good as some.
It's true that the pay is a bit low overall because they want to attract younger, less-skilled workers in terms of branding. The expectation is that those workers can serve as useful guideposts and customer traffic custodians, but they aren't expected to help a customer execute a will. They're just there to help a customer figure out which iPad configuration is best for them. It doesn't take a college graduate to work at that level. A more skilled worker who can command a higher salary in the market probably shouldn't be an Apple Retail Specialist. Honestly, if you're a 20-year-old who just dropped out of ASU as an undergrad and has yet to chart a career course, you could do a lot worse than working at Apple for a while. But if you're a 32-year-old husband and father with a CIS degree, even if you're the most valiant Apple evangelist out there, it really isn't a good job fit for you. And the pay scales reflect that.
Apple simply hasn't developed a business need for a highly skilled marketer with an MBA making $70k/year at its retail stores. The position just doesn't exist. It's not a greedy capitalism thing -- it's just functional necessity. You'd no more expect it than you'd expect a steel foundry to employ a woodcarving coordinator. The job just isn't relevant. Apple's retail business structure is designed to utilize young, chipper, not particularly skilled but socially pleasant young sales reps as its retail "face," backed up by reasonably tech-savvy geniuses solving the 90% most common issues that come up for peoples' computers and devices, and a management chain to coordinate it all. There's nothing wrong with that if you are able to accept the fact that this was the deal you signed up for. Many of these people quoted in these articles left when they "realized they had nowhere to go" or "realized advancement was so unlikely" -- in other words, when their unrealistic (but understandable) expectations finally came into conflict with Apple's retail business stucture.
If Apple's workers were so damned valuable as to be worth paying much, much more than they currently are, other companies would be offering them jobs at those rates. Is that happening? (crickets) No, it's not. And this is true even if you hate capitalism and think it's all greedy wall-street fat cats: After all, don't they want to make the most money possible? To do that, they need to employ the people who will produce those profits. It costs a certain amount to attract such employees. If Apple Retail Specialists were really worth that, Microsoft and the Gap and Paradise Bakery and everyone else on the block would be headhunting them and offering better pay. Corporations vote with their wallets just like any consumer. If anything, even more ruthlessly. Since that's not happening, it stands to reason that whatever Apple is paying its retail reps, it's sufficient to keep them there and continue to attract a net positive number of new ones. (shrug)
I'd love to see people earn more across the board -- I am a huge believer in seeing people rewarded when they execute a plan competently. But if you want to earn more money for doing that, you need to pick a plan with a higher degree of difficulty, that fewer people are capable of executing competently. By an astonishing coincidence, you will find that you will be paid more for doing so and delivering as promised.
