昆明惊现山寨苹果店

新闻直击：
中国昆明出现3家假冒的苹果商店。根据博客BirdAbroad所传出的照片显示，这些假冒苹果商店提供官方苹果商店中的所有东西。员工身穿的蓝色T恤上印有苹果商标，每位员工都有铭牌。店内装修也和官方苹果商店一样宽敞、光亮夺目。最不可思议的是，这些假冒苹果商店的员工都认为自己在为苹果工作。

 I proceeded to place a bet on whether or not this was a genuine Apple store or just the best ripoff we had ever seen – and to be sporting, I bet that it was real.
我纳闷这到底是真的苹果专卖店还是一个完美的山寨货。我主观觉得都到这份儿上了，应该不会是山寨吧。

“做工考究，一丝不苟”

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.
猜着了吧？这果然是山寨的苹果专卖店，而且山寨得极其高端，史上最强！唯一的破绽是：苹果从来不在广告牌上面写“苹果专卖店”，而是直接印上自己缺了口的苹果LOGO。

淡定的顾客们

Clearly, they must “protect the brand”. As I took these photos I was quickly accosted by two salespeople inside, and three plain clothes security guys outside, putting their hands in my face and telling me to stop taking photographs – that it wasn’t allowed. And why wasn’t it allowed? Because their boss told them so.
我想拍照片，结果被严令禁止。他们给出的理由是：老板说了，不让拍。

连人带店打包山寨

I went inside and poked around. They looked like Apple products. 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.
我在这家店里面瞎转悠了半天。看起来它和真正的苹果零售店没什么区别，无论是外观还是产品。华丽丽的旋转楼梯，设计怪诞的用户休息区。员工们甚至还穿着苹果蓝色的店员服，脖子上还挂着员工卡。

 

顾客表示毫无压力

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”. And of course, Apple’s own website will tell you that they only have a few stores in Beijing and Shanghai, opened only recently; Apple famously opens new stores painstakingly, presumably to assure impeccable standards and lots of customer demand. Is this store a copy of one of those in Beijing? A copy of a copy in another Chinese city? A copy of a copy of a copy?! While you’re pondering that, bear in mind: this is a near-perfect ripoff of a store selling products that were almost unknown when we first came to China.
店员们脖子上带的工牌实际上是没有印名字的样子货。在中国也就上海和北京有几家苹果专卖店而已。这家店是山寨北京的苹果专卖店吗？还是山寨其他城市？或者山寨了另一个山寨？好好想想，这家店里面卖的东西可是我初来中国时闻所未闻的。

哥恍惚了，凌乱了！

Being the curious type, I struck up some conversation with these salespeople who, hand to God, all genuinely think they work for Apple. I tried to imagine the training that they went to when they were hired, in which they were pitched some big speech about how they were working for this innovative, global company – when really they’re just filling the pockets of some shyster living in a prefab mansion outside the city by standing around a fake store disinterestedly selling what may or may not be actual Apple products that fell off the back of a truck somewhere.
在好奇心的驱使下，我试着和这里的店员们交流。我勒个七舅老爷，他们竟然真的认为自己受雇于苹果公司……是什么样的入职培训才能达到这样的效果……哥凌乱了。

秒杀真的苹果专卖店

When I went back to this store 5 days later and couldn’t find it, having overshot by two blocks, I seriously thought that it had simply been torn down and replaced with a bank in the mean time.
五天后我回到这家店的时候，店面已经被一家银行取代。

薄了，轻了，快了。哥要哭了。

And the best part? A ten minute walk around the corner revealed not one, but TWO more rip-off Apple stores.
最经典的还在后面——十分钟后，在拐弯的地方又有两家山寨苹果专卖店闪亮登场！