'Oh, I'm Working Retail'

The Apple Store where you’ll do some holiday shopping this year looks the same as always.

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White-oak tables in neat rows welcome you beneath a gleaming Apple logo, the same one you’d see at the store along the Champs-Elysées or in the shadow of the Burj Khalifa. There’s enough white light and open space to make you think you’re walking through a literal Consumer Heaven.

And, of course, there’s the Genius Bar, a help center that for the past two decades has felt like something of a personal concierge service fueled by a small army of friendly, helpful nerds. Genius Bar staffers have generally been trusted to solve your problems, to fix your phone if they could, to replace certain busted headphones for free. In at least one case, captured this spring in a viral TikTok, a dedicated employee taught a coding class to an audience of zero, hoping someone would show up to learn. To this day, strangers flag down off-duty Geniuses for help wherever they see Apple’s signature blue T-shirt.

Behind the scenes, though, things have changed, as interviews with dozens of Apple Store employees across nine cities make clear. Apple Inc.’s retail jobs have started to feel a lot more like, well, retail jobs.