iPhoney: Apple Store fakes conquering China

A blogger has found three incredibly convincing Apple Store knock-offs in a Chinese city, with workers that actually think that they work for Apple.

China, eh? Often considered the land that intellectual property rights forgot, in recent times the country has given us the ‘Vii’ video game console and the upcoming Kung Fu Panda lookalike, Legend of a Rabbit. One blogger’s discovery, takes the strangely familiar biscuit.

27-year-old blogger BirdAbroad, who lives in Kunming, China, returned to her home in the city after a few months abroad and discovered that her neighbourhood had been completely renovated, such is the scale of China’s rapid economic growth.

However, the blogger was most surprised to find that not one but three Apple Stores had sprung up while she was away. Not a bad discovery, we’re sure you’ll agree, however the stores were fakes.

“They looked like Apple products. It looked like an Apple store. It had the classic Apple store winding staircase and weird upstairs sitting area,” BirdAbroad wrote.

“The employees were even wearing those blue t-shirts with the chunky Apple name tags around their necks.

“This was a total Apple store ripoff. A beautiful ripoff – a brilliant one – the best ripoff store we had ever seen (and we see them every day).

“The name tags around the necks of the friendly salespeople didn’t actually have names on them – just an Apple logo and the anonymous designation “Staff”.

The saddest part of the whole sorry discovery? The blogger found that the workers at the store actually believed that they were working for Apple, rather than some absolute chancer.

“We struck up some conversation with these salespeople who, hand to God, all genuinely think they work for Apple,” she continued.

“ I tried to imagine the training that they went to when they were hired, in which they were pitched some big speech about how they were working for this innovative, global company – when really they’re just filling the pockets of some shyster living in a prefab mansion outside the city by standing around a fake store disinterestedly selling what may or may not be actual Apple products that fell off the back of a truck somewhere.

Take a look at the amazingly convincing (not to mention incredibly barefaced) attempt at replicating an Apple Store at the blog entry here.

Pic via BirdAbroad.wordpress.com