Apple stores have a system called Connect and Personalize, under which purchasers of a new iPhone, iPad, or Mac scan a QR code to receive a tutorial from a retail employee. This process temporarily unlocks the customer’s account and payment information and shows the employee any free subscription trials for which the customer is eligible. Look, they will then say, you can get three months of Apple One (for example) for free; tap here to start your trial.
Like most services companies, Apple offers free trials not out of a sense of altruism but in the hopes that customers will carry on using the service after the trial ends. They are free to start with, then they auto-renew after a certain amount of time and the customer begins to pay. But whistleblowers claim the auto-renewal part of the deal was not always made clear to customers. Some employees implied that the trials were simply a gift with no strings; others, it is alleged, tapped Accept on their own device and didn’t get consent at all. Needless to say these are very serious allegations. We have contacted Apple for comment and will update this article to include the company’s response if we receive one.
While reports claim the practice is or has been relatively widespread (one tipster told Rossman that they had “confirmed with others that this happens at other stores” and that “many employees [have] admit[ted] to me that they do this”), one defense Apple could offer is that these were rogue employees taking matters into their own hands. That it wasn’t company policy to have employees behave in this way, and that company management is indeed aghast to hear about such goings-on.
But the issue with that defense is that the problem appears to be systemic. Not explicitly, and perhaps not intentionally, but indirectly as a result of employee incentives.
Apple, again like other companies, tracks the performance of its retail employees. Until recently, one metric by which performance was graded was called “services attach rate:” the percentage of device purchasers assisted by the employee who signed up for a subscription service. It’s been reported that employees in at least some stores were set a target of 40 percent. If you help 10 people buy iPads, you should make sure at least four of them sign up to something at the same time.
It isn’t clear what action was taken (or threatened) against employees who failed to meet this target, or whether there was a reward for those who did. But targets affect behavior even in the absence of explicit punishments and rewards. The mere existence of that 40 percent figure tells employees that the company values that specific form of success, and heavily implies that success or failure by this metric will be one of the factors used to determine promotions, redundancies, pay raises, and bonuses. It would be surreally naive to imagine that putting in place a target of this nature wouldn’t encourage employees to hard-sell signups and, in at least a few cases across an organization with more than 100,000 retail staff, bend the rules regarding informed consent.
