[tyketime]

Fake Apple Store!

Walk by the Apple shop in Beijing’s Sanlitun neighborhood any day and you begin to have an inkling of how popular this brand has become in China in just a couple of years.

Roughly 40,000 visitors a day enter Apple’s shops in Beijing and Shanghai — four times as many as in any of the Apple shops in the United States.

But such popularity can attract imitation that Apple might not view as the sincerest form of flattery.

An American living in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province in China’s remote southwest corner, came across a fake Apple shop.

That’s right.

An entire fake Apple shop.

“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,” writes the blogger.

But upon closer inspection, our intrepid fellow American realized, “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 its signs — it just puts up the glowing, iconic fruit.”

Now it wasn’t clear to the blogger whether the products were fake, too.

But here’s the real kicker: Some of the staff appeared to believe they were really working for Apple.

We checked with Apple, which confirmed it does not have a self-standing retail outlet in Kunming, but it does have a reseller. However, that reseller is nowhere near the "fake" shop mentioned in the blog.