I very much disagree. I'm not ungrateful they gave me a loaner phone. I'm angry over the fact they made me make multiple trips to their store, gave me wrong information each time I was there, and had a complete disregard for my time on top of giving me a complete piece of garbage to use as a replacement phone.
And yes, I abosolutely expect them to have multiple 1TB iPhones sitting around. They DID have them sitting around, they just didn't want to give me one. They'd rather ship my phone off, crack it open, see if they can fix it, and then ship either a refurbished iPhone back to me or the repaired one. That's what is troubling to me. They won't dare hurt their profit margin by giving a consumer a new phone to replace a broken one. They only want to give people refurb phones now for broken ones. Its a garbage policy and I should have been given one of the many new ones they had in stock at the store. But "policy" said they couldn't do that.
Also, the loaner phones they are giving people ARE complete garbage. Its so cheap and petty of Apple to give people iPhone XR's as loaner phones. At bare minimum an iPhone 12 should be the lowest they give someone to use as a loaner. This hunk of junk they gave me has a battery health of 82% and frankly is barely useable. So please stop with the "You should be so grateful to Apple that they bestowed upon you a device to use for the 5 month old $1600 brick you handed over to them."
I'm an ex-retailer. I too have been both pleased and infuriated by the service at Apple Stores. I think there are a lot of reasons for this, including the Apple Store's hiring practices and Apple's corporate culture, but two things, I believe, are important causes for the unacceptable treatment you received.
First, I've heard Apple Stores exert an extremely high level of control, just short of being as scripted as call center workers, over how its customer-facing employees speak with customers. In typical Apple fashion, this means common words like "no" are not allowed (similar to how device dimensions are always described as "x mm thin", not "x mm thick" by Apple Marketing) which leads to a lot of strange, convoluted conversations. This makes a lot of customers frustrated which then leads to high stress levels for store workers. Stressed and strictly supervised staffs are not good for customer service.
Second, Apple Stores seem to follow a unionized workplace model (
very ironic) for organizing sales floor staff. Roles and responsibilities are extremely narrow and inflexible. So, for example, a Greeter cannot answer a simple question about an iPad. Greeters can only greet and direct customers to other Apple workers. Not because they don’t know the answer but because Greeter is their role that shift. When this inflexibility is combined with scripted responses, customers again get frustrated.
None of this, of course, excuses how Apple handled your problem. But I view what happened as a
combination of Apple Store policy and individual employee behavior.
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ETA: Later posts in this thread might be evidence that Apple Store workers are also not allowed to say "sorry" or to make direct apologies to customers. Workers may be trained to "empathize" with whatever negative feelings are expressed by a customer instead. For example, the response to "I'm angry a complete wipe of my phone did not fix the problem and I wasted a lot of time!" would be "I hear what you're saying about how resets can take a lot of time."
