Blogger writes she was duped by fake Apple store in China
Products get knocked off all the time — designer bags, Oscar-night dresses, watches. But entire stores?
That’s something new, and that’s why the Internet went crazy over a blogger’s report that three fake Apple Inc. stores have popped up in her neighborhood in Kunming, China.
In a post dated Wednesday on the blog BirdAbroad, an employee of an international public health organization said she was initially duped by the quality of the fake Apple store.
It had the iconic clean wood interior, Apple branded posters on the walls and employees with those telltale blue polo shirts and chunky name tags hanging around their necks.
The store appeared to sell real Apple products.
Her husband bet it was a fake; she bet it wasn’t. When they got home they looked online and found that Apple doesn’t have any stores in Kunming. A few days later she walked down the street and bumped into two more Apple store knockoffs.
In retrospect, she wrote, some things felt off in the store. The stairs were poorly constructed and the name tags didn’t have names on them, just the word “staff.” She also noted that the walls weren’t painted correctly and the sign in front was wrong.
“Apple never writes ‘Apple Store’ on [its] signs — it just puts up the glowing, iconic fruit,” she wrote.
BirdAbroad, who does not use her real name on her blog and asked that The Times not use it either because of her work, did some fancy maneuvering to take photos in the store.
“I … may or may not have told them that we were two American Apple employees visiting China and checking out the local stores. Either way, they got friendlier and allowed me to snap some pictures,” she wrote.
She also said the employees believed they were working for the real Apple company.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
