Apple Cuts 1,600 Retail Workers, Kinda
Despite a record quarter, Apple is making job cuts.
Earlier this week the Cupertino-based Apple posted its best second quarter earnings results in company history. For its fiscal 2009 second quarter ended March 28, 2009 the company posted revenue of $8.16 billion and a net quarterly profit of $1.21 billion. These results compare to revenue of $7.51 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.05 billion at the end of the same quarter a year ago.
However, just because the books are shining, doesn’t mean all is well within the company. In a SEC filing (via CNet), Apple reported that it employed 14,000 full-time equivalents, down from 15,600 at the end of 2008. While most are claiming that the company is cutting 1,600 people, MediaMemo points out that Apple said is counting man-hours as opposed to actual men. This fits in with old reports that the company was planning to reduce the number of hours worked by part-time employees in an effort to save money without making cuts. The company was apparently reducing hours for part-timers and giving more to full-time workers.
While it’s a little bit surprising given the fact that we just heard how well the company is doing, at the end of the day, it makes a lot of sense. It wasn’t sales of computers that gave Apple its recession-beating numbers this quarter. In fact, sales of Mac 2.22 million desktops and notebooks is a 3 percent decline from a year ago. While iPods were up 3 percent, selling an impressive 11.01 million during the quarter. The real growth came from the iPhone, selling 3.79 million, representing 123 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.
If people are buying iPhones from their cell phone provider and iPods from Best Buy or, well, pretty much anywhere, there’s no point employing all those people to just sell computers.
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Layoffs are expensive as is training replacements once the economy improves. Much better to try and keep the people while reducing costs. This is a smart move on Apples part, though the employees loosing hours may not see it that way.
The elasticity of labor these days is sickening. So if the part-time employers want to make the same money they have to find more than one jobs
It is good though that they keep the same $/hour and they don't fire them. Nice comment by tenor77 btw
Beats working for Wal-Mart I guess. Have heard too many horror stories about how they handle their employees. Some of them have to be true.
wal-mart - random shifts, forced unpaid breaks, minimum wage, no benefits, overtime not allowed
wal-mart - random shifts, forced unpaid breaks, minimum wage, no benefits, overtime not allowed
You'd be surprised how many employers share some of these qualities. when I was there from 2006 to 2008 Lowe's required all full-time associates to take a full unpaid lunch hour. Honesty what's the point? Maybe a quarter of that time was actually spent eating, and the other 45 minutes were spent wondering why an hour of unpaid meaninglessness had been injected into my day. In an hour lunch, anyone that doesn't live within a 10 minute drive pretty much just gets to sit there and do nothing. It unnecessarily turns an 8-hour work day into a 9-hour work day with an hour of it unpaid.
Actualy, Wal-mart provides benifits and pays higher than minimum wage. I am an entry tech support employee and have worked for 3 tech companies including IBM. I have also worked for Wal-mart.
The funny thing is Wal-mart paid about the same and treated me waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better. I'm actualy considering another field as tech support employers try to nickel and dime you to hell. IBM outsources to keep costs down.
Now Wal-mart was very bad on random shifts. On breaks, they required you take your breaks. Period. That was great.
Basicaly, now I work on the phone supporting people. I get paid as much as I did at Wal-mart, have no benefits, and have a liar of a Human Resources manager as I was hired for a certain wage and received a lower one.
There are tons of labor laws on the books and WalMart has to follow them religiously because if they didn't, they would have their asses sued from here until Black Friday. WalMart is very smart and legally savvy. They have to be. The people that bitch about WalMart fail to understand that every all-in-one box store has to do the same thing. You think Target, ShopKo, KMart etc are better places to work? I'd work at WalMart over any of those other stores.
This is exactly the point I was trying to make before on the previous article about Apple sales being up. Just because sales are up, doesn't mean the company is doing well. It needs to be taken into context. But no, I guess I'm just a PC fanboy.
There is a point in it, just not a top priority. By Apple selling the platform, they get more people to buy more things Apple, from more hardware, more licensed accessories, and more software upgrades...
For people with dough, that in-store experence is key. Very wise of them not to cut the 'mac people' all together. Keeps them 'enthused' to have a job, and keeps the experence of handling customers.