And you thought it was hard to knock off an Apple product

On July 20, BirdAbroad posted a story about a visit to a local Apple Store that had recently appeared in Kunming, China.

Well, except for one thing:

[T]his 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.

And the visitors weren't the only ones who were fooled:

Being the curious types that we are, we 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.

The "Apple" employees were so zealous about defending their brand that they initially prevented the BirdAbroad people from taking pictures...until the BirdAbroad people said that THEY were Apple employees from America. (I appreciate the irony.)

BirdAbroad found two other Apple Stores in the vicinity. Well, one of them was technically an "Apple Stoer," but that's close enough if you're not paying supreme attention to detail.

H/T Los Angeles Times. I think.