There have been a fair amount of counterfeit products that have come out of China in the past few years – fake iPhones, iPads, tablets and what have you are pretty much par for the course over there – but this one has got to take the cake. A blogger by the name of BirdAbroad happened to come across a counterfeit Apple store. You read that right – a counterfeit Apple store.
At first glance, the store looks legit – it has the same styling cues as Apple stores in the US, same store layout, same shirts that Apple store employees wear. But upon closer inspection, BirdAbroad found a few things amiss that raised red flags. “This was a total Apple store rip-off. A beautiful rip-off – a brilliant one – the best rip-off store we had ever seen (and we see them every day). But some things were just not right: the stairs were poorly made. The walls hadn’t been painted properly. Apple never writes “Apple Store” on its signs – it just puts up the glowing, iconic fruit.”
Okay, so some of you are probably saying that although this particular store might have copied the whole look of an Apple store, and the fact that they’re selling genuine Apple products mean that they’re a real store, right? Well, not exactly. Take the Power Mac Center. While they look like an Apple store, they’re a premium reseller, not an Apple owned store. You can clearly see the store’s logo from the outside. The store that BirdAbroad found was selling products as if the store was owned by Apple, and therein lies the rub. Since the owner of the store apparently doesn’t care about respecting the very IP of the brand he’s supposed to be selling, what are the odds that some of the stock in his inventory are genuine Apple products, or that the people doing repairs and whatnot are actually certified by Apple?
The saddest part of all of this is that the employees that are working in the store genuinely think that they’re working for Apple, which really kind of bums us out.
Source: BirdAbroad