As reported by Reuters (also Gizmodo), a fake Apple store in Kunming, China, which sells genuine Apple products, has some customers upset that it is not the real deal. Even though the products they are buying are apparently genuine. Not all customers have the IP mentality. As one customer said:
“As long as their products are real it’s okay — after all, you enter a store not to look at anything except their products,” said Hu Junkai, 18. “If the products you buy are real why do you care whether the store is a copy?”
Or as one non-Apple clerk noted:
“It doesn’t make much of a difference for us whether we’re authorized or not,” explained the clerk. “I just care that what I sell every day are authentic Apple products, and that our customers don’t come back to me to complain about the quality of the products.”
But you can be sure the intellectual protectionists will have conniption fits about this and cobble together some rickety “theory” to explain why this is “theft.”
Kinsella:
I agree with your conclusions, but here the analysis can be misleading for some people because you didn’t stress a related and relevant point. The point is the following. Some customers might have been mislead into believing they are buying Apple-made material directly from Apple, due to the store branding. That’s fraud — from a principled perspective I should have to say no more. From a consequentialist perspective, those people might miss on several benefits which they were expecting. For instance, if they bring their material back into the store for repairs they won’t be diagnosed and repaired by Apple certified technicians, as those customers might expect from an Apple-branded store. Nor will the clerk advice on which product to buy be from an Apple employee, as the customer might expect and therefore trust.
Do you agree?
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