Apple Store Employees Aren't Allowed To Say 'Crash', 'Bug', or 'Problem'

Long-time Slashdot reader mspohr shares a Guardian article which argues that Apple Store employees 'are underpaid, overhyped and characters in a well-managed fiction story' who 'use emotional guile to sell products':
When customers run into trouble with their products, geniuses are encouraged to sympathize, but only by apologizing that customers feel bad, lest they implicate Apple's products as the source of the trouble. In this gas-lit performance of a 'problem free' brand philosophy, many words are actually verboten for staff. Do not use words like crash, hang, bug, or problem, employees are told. Instead say does not respond, stops responding, condition, issue, or situation. Avoid saying incompatible; instead use does not work with. Staff have reported the absurdist dialogues that can result, like when they are not allowed to tell customers that they cannot help even in the most hopeless cases, leading customers into circular conversations with employees able neither to help nor to refuse to do so....

[I]n a move so ridiculous it's almost certain to be a hit, the Genius Bar has been rebranded the 'Genius Grove'. Windows are opened to blur the distinction between inside and outside, and the stores are promoted as quasi-public spaces. 'We actually don't call them stores any more,' the new head of retail at Apple, former Burberry executive Angela Ahrendts (2017 salary: $24,216,072), recently told the press. 'We call them town squares.'

The article argues that since there launch in 2001, Apple Stores 'have raked in more money -- in total and per square foot -- than any other retailer on the planet, transforming Apple into the world's richest company in the process.'

But it also complains that Apple's wealth 'flows from the privatization of publicly funded research, mixed with the ability to command the low-wage labor of our Chinese peers, sold by empathetic retailers forbidden from saying 'crash'.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.