Buzzfeed:
Earlier this week, a video surfaced of three black teenagers from Sudan and Somalia being barred from entering an Apple store in Melbourne, Australia, because an employee thought “they might steal something.” The company subsequently apologized.
In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, Tim Cook weighed in on the situation, calling it “unacceptable.”
“What people have seen and heard from watching the video on the web does not represent our values. It is not a message we would ever want to deliver to a customer or hear ourselves,” Cook wrote in the companywide email. “None of us are happy with the way this was handled.”
It is unclear if any disciplinary measures were taken against the manager involved in the incident, but multiple sources familiar with the situation say the employee hasn’t been at the store since.
Nor should they be. While this is yet another embarrassment for Apple this week, I think we can all agree that, as Cook says in the email, this doesn’t represent the company’s values.
I don’t think anybody accuses Apple of being racist, but they should look into some organizational matters here, and see if any corrections are needed. Regular, low pay staff is normally not too eager to make such decisions out of the blue, that’s without having received instructions or guidelines.
Not suggesting there is a problem, but I see huge differences in service, friendliness, aggressiveness of up-selling attempts etc. by staff members between different Apple Stores (even between the two I have in my city). This indicates that there is quite some influence of the local shop management, and maybe not enough streamlining from the mothership. They should look into this. If it really was just one bad apple, then fine.