legendsk
Member
I'll give you a couple of examples. They convinced businesses to become Apple sellers. After all the fees and investments, they pressured these dealers to stock more inventory, with a variety of threats so bad that many stocked several months of sales. Once the 'dealer' pipe line was stuffed full, on Friday their Apple salesman, did a high pressure push. Then on Monday announced they had decided to only sell to distributors, (Like Chrystal, Newark Electronics, WW Grainger, etc.) and all 'dealers', would henceforth have to get their inventory and parts from the distributors. Once the dozens, scores, hundreds(?) of distributors pipe line was stuffed to the max, they changed their minds and would no longer sell to distributors, who became former Apple distributors, with a mountain of inventory. They were forced to sell their inventory at a big loss. Apple then went back to selling direct to anyone who would jump through all the hoops to become an Apple dealer. Except the cost to an Apple dealer was 25% more than the street price from a distributor - and the distributors were selling to anyone.
Once the pipe line was full again, they announced they were opening Apple stores owned by Apple and all 'dealers' were cancelled. By canceled meaning, the 'dealers' would no longer be reimbursed for warranty repairs and could no longer buy Apple parts from Apple or an Apple store.
A friend had 21 computer stores in 6 states that were 'Apple dealers' as well as other brands like IBM, Compaq, Columbia, Franklin, etc. IBM upon learning he was longer an Apple dealer concluded he was a risk and killed his IBM dealership and the combination bankrupted him. Ultimately he sued Apple and the suit was settled out of court with Apple paying him a rumored $25,000,000.
While my store was a 'dealer', I had one sale of 600 Apple Macintosh computers to a business. Apple got wind of it and went to the business and offered to sell them units at 20% less than any quote I would make.
When I was suddenly no longer an Apple 'dealer', I had $750,000 worth of repair parts in inventory. I could use some of those on out-of-warranty repairs, but quickly ran out of common parts and couldn't buy those from Apple, so I couldn't really repair any Apple products and was left with $450,000 worth of parts that I had to put in a dumpster because they were worthless.
That's typical Apple business. Generally not quite illegal, just extremely hard ball.
