Roughly 40,000 visitors a day enter Apple’s shops in Beijing and Shanghai
Roughly 40,000 visitors a day enter Apple’s shops in Beijing and Shanghai — four times as many as in any of the Apple shops in the United States.
But such popularity can attract imitation that Apple might not view as the sincerest form of flattery.
An American living in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province in China’s remote southwest corner, came across a fake Apple shop.
“They looked like Apple products. It looked like an Apple store. It had the classic Apple store winding staircase and weird upstairs sitting area. The employees were even wearing those blue t-shirts with the chunky Apple name tags around their necks,” writes the blogger.
But upon closer inspection, our intrepid fellow American realized, “A beautiful ripoff — a brilliant one — the best ripoff 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.”
Why is this surprising? They have similar stores like these in Chinatowns all over the United States. They just don’t have storefronts. haha