Apple The Americana at Brand — Attraction in Glendale

Customer service here is abysmal. I am covered under warranty, but I am leaving this feedback before anyone puts up money for repair at this location. Just don't, in fact, if you are under warranty go somewhere else and save yourself a headache.

You will be passed around technician to technician to technician who are friends with each other but are complete strangers to common sense and quality customer service. I came with a charging issue and left with a phone not connected to my carrier and now have to go to another location (my carrier) to fix it DESPITE me explicitly pointing out that the carrier will be closed.

Everyone at this store was insincere, misinformed, and it really shouldn't take 5 people, who don't introduce themselves nor inform you that you're being passed to another person to help with a simple issue. Shame on the staff at this store and whoever is training or evaluating these folks. They do not communicate to each other other than to disrespect customers (listen around you and you'll overhear them berating customers like its schoolyard gossip). They give you incomplete information, and you are likely going to leave with more of a headache than you came with.

The first technician didn't tell me his name asked me to explain my issue, went to the back and never came out to help me again.

The second technician, Andre:

1. asked me to explain the issue again,
2. doubted me and snarkily said, "well it's charging now" despite it doing exactly what I said immediately after (battery still went down).
3. He then told me two different times to return for the repair to be completed and when I asked for clarity he said they could call me if it finishes earlier. I'm giving you my phone dude, how are you going to call me?
4. The most critical one, he takes a picture of my esim and says, in the event something goes wrong they need my esim to activate my phone. I ask, how often does that happen and he says it's rare, assuring me that I'll be set up in store. I ask if I should just reschedule because my carrier will be closed by the time he gave me. He says it shouldn't be a problem and that they can take care of it.

When I returned at the earlier time communicated, a new technician said "they told you this time, right?"- never introduced their name - I had to defend that the time was communicated to me by their staff!

I come in the second time and yet another technician tells me it's ready. ANOTHER technician comes out of the back and says I need a photo ID. This needs to be explained AT THE BEGINNING of the process, not after. What if I didn't have it? I would have waited an hour and a half to not be able to retrieve the equipment that they took in! Surely there is some kind of protocol or this place just runs or these folks are real good at freestyling stupidity in motion.

This technician then looks at me and says, "they explained to you about the esim right?" Almost as if he knew that the previous technician left out a critical part of the process. He then proceeds to explain that they can NOT activate my phone in store and I have to take it to my carrier. He then candidly asks another technician in store, who affirms he can not, as if this is common knowledge.

I am now irate, and explain how poor this whole experience has been. He says that the part of the phone they replaced also replaces the eSIM, so there would have been no way for them to connect it. WHY TAKE THE PICTURE THEN. WHO LET ANDRE BE IN CUSTOMER SERVICE? He verbally tells me I can take your frustrations - do they do this to you a lot, sir? He then says, my name is John acknowledging that no one here knows how to introduce themself at the beginning of a conversation. He then says, I can offer you an apology and you can activate it via the web.

Now at home trying to get my phone running again, I am finding out in order to activate on the web with my carrier, you need a phone number to contact. SO John's consolation and assurance ISN'T EVEN CORRECT.

What an absolute cesspool of incompetence and a disaster of...

My experience with this store and Apple representatives in general over the past few weeks has made me decide I'm done buying apple products. There are enough solid options out there now that I see no reason to let them continue to provide inferior products at outrageous prices. Here is the gist:

I spent 50 minutes (fifty. no joke) on hold with this store trying to schedule a time to replace my completely depleted battery (they ran logistics on it over the phone and told me this was the reason my phone was regularly dying at 30% battery, why apps would randomly close or take 40+ seconds to open and why the GPS will no longer track my location). "Fortunately" they had a $29 "special" price on the battery replacement; all I had to do was wait several weeks and then wait between 3 and 5 hours at the store for it to be fixed. What a bargain...

I arrived at the store and the man helping me told me I needed to take the one-time use only $10 cover off my phone before they would fix it. I did so. He then asked if I also wanted to replace the screen that had a hairline crack in it. I said I did not. He said it might get more damaged in the repair process. I said that was fine as long as I could still use it. Then he kept saying he needed to make sure I understood that it would be "my doing" if the phone was more damaged and that he couldn't guarantee it would work when they were finished with it. I asked if he could come out and let me know if it was no longer working, or just fix it only if it was broken beyond repair. He said he could not, and that I had to decide right then and there if I wanted to fix it. Anyway, this went on for a while and he eventually asked the manager who said just kidding, you actually MUST have the whole screen repaired in order for them to fix the battery. Mind you, no one has mentioned this over the phone on any of my many calls, nor did the emails I received say anything about it. I asked to speak to her. In case you go here, her name is Taline and she's a real treat.

She came out and repeated what the man had told me. She said "well, this is where we are now, so what do you want to do." I said that we were only in this position because of all the errors and poor management by Apple. She said she didn't see it that way. I then asked if she thought waiting 50 minutes on hold to talk to someone at her store was reasonable.

She said "well, we've had people wait a whole lot longer than that, so yeah, I'd say it is okay." Your Apple customer service, ladies and gentlemen.

I called customer service to complain about this entire process. The customer service agent I spoke with was a drippy, syrupy saccharine man named Kelvin. He profusely apologized and fell all over himself to tell me how sorry he was for my experience. But then of course, towed the party line. Nothing they can do, with a lot of "unfortunately" and "I know this isn't the outcome you were hoping for" and "as your apple representative I want you to know that this is the best option available." I asked if they could at least repair the screen for the going rate of $79 since I didn't have an opportunity to fix it myself prior to fighting for this appointment. No. I asked if at the VERY least they could give me a $10 discount for making me ruin my one-time screen cover to assess the damage prior to "fixing" my phone, which they then refused to do unless I piled on 4x the amount of money I thought I'd be paying for this repair. No. But, says Kelvin, please know that I am your apple representative and I will be here for you in the future, rain or shine, to reject all your future apple needs and requests thank you very much have a nice day.

So that was it. Last straw. Google phone here I come. Apple, I suggest that you get your act together here really soon. This is not how you keep your...

Review is for store #R451. This is the place to go if you have stolen credit cards and need to commit fraud. They don’t check ID! Even if your face is on the back of the credit card. There are people working here (at least one in management) that are complicit in credit card fraud. I’ll explain below.

On around January 25, my car was broken into and the thieves stole several credit cards (but left my drivers license in the car). Instead of driving 10 minutes to the Pasadena Apple Store, they drove 45 MINUTES in rush hour traffic to this Glendale store. They first attempted to run my debit card which in the amount of $1762.90. Was blocked. Then they ran my 1st card, blocked. They managed to charge my 2nd card card (which has a full color picture of my face on it) and get out with over $1700 worth of merchandise. Now…all the Apple Stores I’ve been to tend to ask for ID on large purchases.

So the same day (25 minutes after I got the fraud alerts on my phone) I called someone at the store who claimed he was a manager. Have the name but won’t share it here. I was trying to explain to him that either someone there is really not properly trained or was knowingly assisting. He didn’t care at all. He said everyone is trained to ask for ID and that when they replay the cameras, it will show them using my drivers license. But I told him that I have the drivers license in my hand. That somebody on the staff allowed it to go through without checking ID. He was not interested at all in helping me out or getting to the bottom of this. Didn’t ask for time it happened, didn’t ask for the amount. Just didn’t care at all. When I asked him if he could pull up the receipt given my card number, time of transaction, transaction amount, last name etc - he said “No I can’t do that. They don’t let us managers have access to that.” What manager doesn’t have access to pull receipts for transactions???? Probably a manager that doesn’t want the name of the employee handling the transaction to be revealed. It was discovered by the credit card company that they used the physical chip on all 3 cards (not an online order). So this was a face to face transaction with an Apple employee using the physical card and the portable card reader. Then when I asked the “manager” if he could have loss control (the Apple store’s own security) check the footage and find out who was assisting the thief/to see who used the card he said “No. I can’t do that. But I can transfer you to our loss prevention number.” So he transferred me. It was 1-800 Apple support. The Apple support lady had no idea what this manager was talking about. There does not exist such a department. So the manager diverted me to a bogus number. I’ve already filed a police report.

But be careful… there’s a reason these thieves drove 45 minutes out of their way to try 3 credit cards here on nearly $1.8k of merchandise. There are multiple people working here that are “in on” this crime. Management will not help you. If a regional manager (someone higher up) who actually cares reads this, I hope you can root out the people that are improperly trained and/or involved. Not asking for ID on a $1800 purchase is just gross negligence.

We live in a society where fewer and fewer people take accountability/responsibility for things that should fall on them. It does not matter if a credit card company will investigate and refund the money two months later. It’s a major inconvenience for people to carry a $1,800 balance from a fraudulent charge. It’s encouraging to thieves knowing that they can get away with this because nobody will follow up and nobody will bother to look at camera footage and nobody will bother to discipline employees that are complicit in this (or if...