said by BellBoy:In my experience, good luck finding someone at a BB or Target that knows what they're talking about in regards to multiple brands.
Personally I find it refreshing to go someplace where people know what they're talking about--and if they don't, they try to find out the answer with you. Other than the Apple Store, just about the only other place that knows their shit is the Container Store.
I'll disagree, to an extent.
The quality of Apple Store floor (not Genius Bar) personnel has gone way downhill over the years. Years ago, they seemed to have an above average knowledge of their products, but of late, it seems that the current crop of sales people are more like typical retail employees, no different than Best Buy, etc.
I had one greeter attempt to help me with my laptop (before an appointment with Genius Bar) who, three times touched the display trying to show me something. I guess he might not have known the difference between an iPad screen, designed for touching, and a laptop's which is not.
On many occasions, I've overheard them giving wrong or incomplete advice.
In addition, the inventory at the Apple Store is far simpler to master than a typical Best Buy. There are basically just a handful of products for sale, all very similar, with most products, if not all, from one manufacturer, Apple. The products are very easy to understand and anyone who has spent any time using them, an iPhone, for example, can easily appear to be an expert to a non user.
Best Buy, on the other hand, stocks significantly more products and each product for sale has many different models, brands, etc.
For example, Apple sells two routers, AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule, essentially the same product, only one has a backup drive built in. Best Buy may stock twenty different routers. The same employee tasked with knowing all these models also has forty different printers, twenty different hard drives and thirty different laptops an aisle away. How can they possibly know and understand all the varieties as well as the Apple Store employee?
IMHO, it's not that Apple has superior quality personnel, but it's easy for them to appear so by the simplicity of the products and the relatively limited choice of the product line.