—All You Zombies—

The New York Times has an interesting article about the employees at Apple stores. These guys, mostly in their 20s and mostly with college degrees, make up 30,000 of Apple's 43,000 US employees and earn between $11.25 and $17.31 an hour.


It's a decent enough job, as far as retail goes. Unlike Walmart, they offer health care, 401(k) contributions, a chance to buy Apple stock and discounts on Apple products. But unlike employees at Verizon and AT&T stores, they're not on commission. They work in very hectic and stressful conditions and have no real path to career advancement. It's a dead-end job. But many Apple store employees move up to $3 million a year of expensive Apple products.

Now, some people will say that these guys don't deserve a piece of the action because Apple products sell themselves. Apple's customer base is essentially a cult who will buy anything emblazoned with the logo, no matter how expensive it is, and they will buy it over and over again each time the company releases a new version with even the most trivial enhancements just so they can say they have the latest Apple gewgaw.

As such, Apple store employees are just glorified cash registers. But the fact is, these guys do more than ring up purchases. They help you pick the right product and provide tech support: no matter how fabulous the product might look in the ads, there are always problems that require real human beings to fix.

But let's say that this is true. Apple store employees are interchangeable cogs that don't deserve a living wage because Apple customers are zombies with an insatiable hunger for brains—err, iPhones. The genius of Steve Jobs, his vision, drive and cynical manipulation of his customers' egos made Apple what it is today. Fair enough. But if so, what's good for the employee is good for the CEO.

According to the article, Apple CEO Tim Cook "received stock grants, which vest over a 10-year period, that at today’s share price would be worth more than $570 million." Yes, Apple's CEO Tim Cook is worth half a billion dollars just because Steve Jobs died. Cook did squat to earn that kind of compensation, he's just the guy who happened to sit down in Jobs' chair when the music stopped.

This is a perfect illustration of what's wrong with executive compensation in this country. Pretty much anyone could have inherited Steve Job's job and kept Apple profitable, just be staying out of the way of product designers and marketers. If Tim Cook got hit by a bus tomorrow, Apple wouldn't skip a beat.

The fact is, the guys on top of pretty much any publicly owned corporation are just as interchangeable as Apple store employees. But since interlocking corporate boards of directors (CEOs typically sit on the boards of other companies) decide compensation, for the last 50 years CEOs have been sitting around voting each other pay raises. In that time CEO pay has risen from 40 times the average employee's salary to 400 times.

But we still haven't mentioned the people who are really responsible for Apple's success: the engineers and programmers who design these products, and the workers in China who work 18-hour days at a rate of $22 a day to build them. And, lest we forget, the legions of zombies who ultimately provide all the company's profits, the customers themselves.

It's really All You Zombies out there who made Apple a success. If you think the guy at the Apple store who fixed your iPhone helped you more than Tim Cook ever did, let Apple know that Apple store employees deserve a piece of the action.