Manager of Apple Store, Beijing, Allegedly Beats Customer to Quell Chaos

Apple’s popularity has taken on a violent form in Beijing. If you though that standing in long queues for your iPhones or iPad’s was bad enough, if you were in China and at Apple’s flagship Beijing store on Saturday afternoon, you would have been in for a rough ride.

Bedlam broke out at the store while ‘over-anxious’ customers were standing around waiting in line to get a hold of a new Apple device. It was reported that three people were injured while a few panes of store’s glass were broken and one man was allegedly beaten by a “foreign Apple employee” with an “iron rod”. That could have been a mite exaggerated as the updates on the story do mention that the “foreign Apple employee” was apparently the store manager and a sum of RMB20,000 (about US$3,000) would be paid to the injured party as compensation. You think they threw in an iPhone 4 or an iPad 2 as well?

Chaos reigned at the Beijing Apple store

The fanaticism of Apple users has reached a new low with this incident but it does go to show just how insanely popular the brand and its products are. Penn-Olson.com reported in an update to the story that ‘Scalping’ was one of the reasons for the chaos as many were there simply to try and palm off or their existing devices to make a quick buck. Of course other arsons like queue jumping etc. were also most likely other reasons. All of this just to get a hold of a Wi-Fi only iPad 2 and, or a White iPhone 4.

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?