Sucks to be an Apple retail employee. Apple has reduced the hours of of their be-t-shirted geniuses have been fired this quarter, down from 15,600 in Q1. They are also planning fewer retail locations this year and are ramping down the use of part-time employees.
The SEC filing, which also said that Apple was doing amazingly well, considering the economy, noted retail store sales were generally down although they opened new 45 stores since last year.
Maybe the Gateway stores are hiring? Or Circuit City?
no where does it say that anyone has been fired. the comment about the number of full time employees is just a number. no where has it said anything about firings, layoffs etc. it is possible that that many folks moved on to other jobs. it ain’t like retail is such a grand and well paying job that someone wouldn’t move if given the right offer.
ah the thong photo…
Pretty sure they don’t keep the Christmas selling season folks on the payroll year-round.
The 15,600 “full-time equivalent” employee number was posted in a filing on December 27. It included seasonal employees hired for the Christmas shopping season. Gee, I wonder why those seasonal employees were let go. Perhaps because the Christmas season ended?
This is a lame story.
Wow where’s the outrage people? Oh let me guess it’s apple so it’s ok for them to get rid of these employees?
We all know what happens if this was MS! Pure hipocrisy but then again that’s to be expected!
The word you are looking for is “hypocrisy”.
And I don’t believe 1,600 employees were laid off. I believe Apple cut back the hours of their workers-to allow them to keep their jobs but at reduced hours equivalent to around 1,600 full time hours-counted.
That is how I read their SEC filing. But given your anti-Apple bias, I’m sure you have a different take, as that too is to be expected :p
Shrewd move by Apple.
This way, not only are the workers ineligible for full unemployment benefits, but they also get to string them along in a dead-end job without much hope of making enough to pay the bills while also cutting off their chances of finding a decent full-time job with a competitor!
I refuse to be a ‘Pod-Person’, enjoy being a corporate whore you goofs. ;)
and of course you know for a fact that part time employees receive no benefits (guess what some companies do give paid time off, health insurance etc to all employees), what the pay rate is etc. so you can say that working at Apple is a ‘dead end’ job.
i don’t know if they do since I don’t work there but I’m not going to bash them for a lack I can’t prove there is.
Microsoft is NOT a retail company that very likely hired seasonal help for the holidays, as almost all retail companies do. Help that is hired just for the holidays and with no expectation of being kept on afterwards.
that is very likely the source of at least a fair portion of the 1600 ‘full time equiv’ folks missing from the new count. NOT that Apple just shitcanned a bunch of folks for no reason other than they could get away with it. another decent cut probably found something better than working retail for at best $10 an hour and moved on.
Let’s look at FTEs from a year ago, and then extrapolate for the additional stores.
Here are the numbers:
March 2008 = ~12,000 FTEs
March 2009 = ~14,000 FTEs
Both figures were preceded by the word “approximately”, so they are clearly + or – 500 FTEs. Around 17% more FTEs this year than last, HOWEVER…, you have to factor in the number of stores open.
March 2008 = 205 stores
March 2009 = 251 stores
So, number of stores increased by 22%, and FTEs increased roughly 17%, but given the vagueness, the range would be from, 8% to 26%.
In other words, the increase is in the margin of error. Much ado about very little.
It sucks to be John Biggs. He’s just proven that he can’t read and understand an SEC filing.
The number mentioned is hours, NOT employees.
Of course we can’t expect clarification as that would be good journalism and we won’t get it here.
The desperation from the other side is really silly. The WSJ was the only one that explained the numbers variation properly. Some news sites just regurgitate the word on the street, never bothering to research. Journalistic integrity is mostly dead.