AT&T Gears Up for iPhone by Hiring 2,000 Extra Employees

AT&T is gearing up for the big iPhone launch by hiring extra employees – 2,000 of them in fact. Those 2,000 employees have been hired for temporary employment to help handle the new iPhone. That’s a lot of additional people, although, Apple is shipping 3,000,000 iPhones for the launch. Should the iPhone take-off like Apple expects, they will certainly need additional employees to help.  

As you’re probably aware of by now, the device will start selling on June 29th.  AT&T stores will be closing at 4:30 on Friday and then they will reopen at 6 PM to start selling the iPhones until they close at 10 PM. That means that you will have to be patient and wait all day before you’ll be able to purchase one.

AT&T has spent some serious time training their employees to sell the iPhone.  A total of 100,000 hours went into it with around 6 hours of training per employee. I’d hope that their employees will be able to answer any question given that kind of training.  I also wonder how many temp. employees Apple hired because that information hasn’t been disclosed.

Another thing to keep in mind is that AT&T hasn’t said what kind of services fees iPhone customers will be charged.  All we know for sure is that the phone will either be $499 or $599 depending on whether you want the 4GB or the 8GB model.

For Apple and AT&T’s sake, I hope that the iPhone is as big of a success as they have planned for.  That’s a lot of dollars to put into training, and a lot of extra employees to bring on if it turns out to be a phone only the rich will be willing to buy.

Source: Reuters [via Yahoo]

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Tags: Gadgets, Apple, Downloads, iPhone, Microsoft, Screenshots

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