A grand total of 5 fake Apple Stores were recently uncovered in the Chinese city of Kumming.
Imagine you’re an American living abroad in China for a year where you find yourself taking up residence in a small quaint city called Kumming. One day, you just happen to be walking around and, lo and behold, you stumble into an Apple retail store.
Shock and surprise permeate through your body. I mean, Apple does have official stores in China, but they’re all in Beijing and Shanghai, right? Could it be that Apple has opened up new retail outlets in China under the radar?
In short, no.
Believe it or not, but one American expatriate in Kumming, China spilled the beans on not 1, not 2, not 3, but 5 fake Apple stores operating in one Chinese city.
As the pictures below indicate, not one detail was spared in mimicking the exact look and feel of Apple’s now iconic fleet of retail stores. From employees sporting colorful shirts to the wooden tabletops used to display Apple’s latest and greatest products, these retail knockoffs are surprisingly spot on. One store even went so far as to install a winding staircase a’la the Apple store on 5th Avenue in New York.
Further, and perhaps a tad surprising, the Apple products pictured above aren’t, ironically enough, knockoffs themselves. Indeed, subsequent calls to these bootleg retail shops revealed that these stores sell authentic Apple products purchased form official Apple stores or licensed retailers. Undoubtedly, some are also smuggled in from America and other countries.
Now Apple spends quite a bit of money constructing its Apple stores so it’s not as if these imposter stores are exact replicas of the real thing. Indeed, visitors have commented that the quality of materials used isn’t up to par with what one would find in an official retail outlet.
Besides, a casual mis-spelling is all one needs to recognize that something fishy is going on.
Reports of these counterfeit Apple Stores quickly made the rounds on the Apple blogosphere and even attracted the attention of Chinese authorities. Earlier this week, news surfaced that the powers that be in China shut down two of the 5 bootleg stores – though the reason behind the closures isn’t what you might assume.
As it turns out, Chinese officials shut down two of the stores not because they blatantly infringed upon Apple’s intellectual property, but rather because they lacked proper business licenses. I guess the moral of the story here is that intellectual property theft is a-ok in China as long as you have a business license.
Good to know.
And for those looking for a silver lining, some have pointed out that Apple products in Kumming are apparently so popular that the city can profitably support 5 Apple retail stores all located very close to one another.
I suppose that’s a problem most companies would kill for.
