Him helping that elderly person undermined Apple's highly engineered brand interaction with that customer. Apple is there to have you bring your computers in to

Him helping that elderly person undermined Apple's highly engineered brand interaction with that customer. Apple is there to have you bring your computers in to the genius bar and interact with you to build brand loyalty and sell you more things. The customer is then supposed to go tell their friends how wonderful the Apple Store is. Instead, an Apple employee undermined the precision-crafted brand experience with this customer. Worse yet, if he would have messed up the transfer, he'd be making Apple look really bad when the customer told their friends about how unreliable getting a new Mac going can be due to their experience. This is possibly their narrative on this issue. Companies like Apple worry endlessly about this, which is how they have earned their reputation with customers. I can understand a warning or write-up being an educational opportunity for the employee to understand the problem here, but clearly there was no malicious intent here, firing someone over this is really poor management unless they are a repeat offender after a warning.