Yesterday we read the news that 22 more fake Apple stores had been uncovered in China! Well they can’t have been looking very hard as we photographed 17 fake Apple stores in Qingdao, Shandong alone today!Qingdao is an up and coming city of around 10million people. The city is famous for Tsingtao beer, the 2008 Olympic sailing, this rather odd lady, and now for it’s fake Apple stores.
This fake Apple store in Qingdao, China isn’t content with claiming to be an official Apple reseller, so they have gone ahead and knocked of Korean brands, LG’s logo!
The stores are spread across the city but it didn’t take long for us to cycle to the ones we knew and take photos of them, but what surprised us was the shear number of new fake Apple stores that had sprung up!
News of Beijing cracking down on store owners and shops using the Apple logos and names without permission has obviously spread to Qingdao, and more than once we were asked to not photograph the stores!
We were even chased off by one fake Apple store employee after taking this photo!
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Not all the fake store owners were camera shy though!
Like the now famous Kunming stores, the fake Apple stores in Qingdao claim to be “official stockists” or “official resellers” for Apple. The interior design is also fashioned on the open plan designs of the genuine Apple stores, and the employees even where Apple branded uniforms!
Speaking of Apple branded clothing we also came across a few people sporting some Apple fashion.
This woman in the purple Apple shirt just happen to be walking past one of the stores as we took the photo.
And we spotted this guy on our way home!
It seems Apple have an extremely difficult time ahead of them, if their plan are to rid China of all unofficial stores. A job which looks down right impossible to us after we have seen the speed these fake Apple boutique stores are opening!
