Claps and cheers: Apple stores' carefully managed drama

Those 'geniuses' in the bright, sleek Apple store are underpaid, overhyped and characters in a well-managed fiction story

Steve Jobs wanted customers to understand the Apple store "with one sweep of the eye," as if gods standing on Mount Olympus. Indeed, the outlets seem to speak for themselves. Bright, uncluttered, and clad in glass, they couldn't contrast more sharply with the big-box labyrinths they were designed to replace.

Neither could their profit margins. Since launching in 2001, the instantly recognizable stores have raked in more money - in total and per square foot - than any other retailer on the planet, transforming Apple into the world's richest company in the process. Yet the very transparency of the Apple store conceals how those profits are made.