There Are At Least Three Fake Apple Stores in Kunming, China

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Blogger Bird Abroad is an ex-pat living in Kunming, the capital of the Yunnan Province in southwestern China, and, recently noticed that alongside all the bona-fide Starbucks, H&Ms, McDonald's, and KFCs opening up in town, there's also a shiny, brand-new Apple Store—three actually.

Well, kind of. Turns out the Kunming Apple Stores are a total fake.

Bird Abroad writes about the first one they went into:

It looked like an Apple store. It had the classic Apple store winding staircase and weird upstairs sitting area. The employees were even wearing those blue t-shirts with the chunky Apple name tags around their necks.

You have already guessed the punchline, of course: this was a total Apple store ripoff. A beautiful ripoff—a brilliant one—the best ripoff store we had ever seen (and we see them every day). But some things were just not right: the stairs were poorly made. The walls hadn’t been painted properly.

Apple never writes “Apple Store” on it’s signs—it just puts up the glowing, iconic fruit. The name tags around the necks of the friendly salespeople didn’t actually have names on them—just an Apple logo and the anonymous designation “Staff”.

What was really mindblowing? When Bird Abroad spoke with the employees on the selling floor, they all thought they actually worked for Apple. Oh, and there were two more totally fake Apple stores just around the corner.
· Are you listening Steve Jobs? [Bird Abroad]
· The fake Apple store in China so convincing that even its staff are fooled [Daily Mail]