How Productive is an Apple Store Employee?

How productive is the average Apple Store employee? Horace Dediu, in an article for asymco.com takes his best shot at estimating the “value” of an Apple Store employee.

He calculated the following:

“Apple publishes data about its “retail segment” which ifoAppleStore.com catalogs. Here are some statistics I was able to compute from the data:

• The stores generate over $100k per employee per quarter. In 2010, revenue was $481,000 per employee. This year the average is around $320k excluding the fourth quarter. In 2009 the average revenue for the technology sector was $388k/yr. A retailer like JC Penney generates about $124k of revenue per year per employee.
• The revenue per visit is around $45. There are well over 250 million visits per year (222 million for first three quarters of 2011).

The combination of these two metrics are shown in the following chart:

• The number of employees has grown in proportion to the number of visits. There is one employee for every 2,500 visits/quarter. The following chart shows the relationship between retail personnel and store visitors on a quarterly basis.

• Assuming an employee works for 360 hours per quarter, the average employee sees 6 visitors per hour or one every 10 minutes.
• As that visitor generates more than $45 of revenue, an Apple store employee creates sales at the rate of about $278/hour.”

This seems to be an average of all employees, including Specialists, Geniuses, Managers, and Back of House personnel, I know from my own experience as an Apple Store Specialist last year that Managers and Back of House do not deal with customers on a face-to-face basis. So, the average for Specialists, (who are usually on the sales floor for most of their shift,) would increase. 6 visitors per hour can be a very low number if you are patrolling a high traffic area of the store such as accessories, or even iPods. During the holiday season, the numbers can rise even higher. Oh my aching feet!