On: Apple Stores earned $481,000 per employee in 2010

That's a stupid, stupid metric.

Most good Oracle sales staff would be probably be generating at least an order of magnitude more than that, and they don't have to cover the costs of the fancy Apple store fitouts. OTOH, they do have to cover a lot of airplane tickets and expensive lunches.

Looking at revenue per employee in only one business segment is meaningless.

It is totally, completely and utterly irrelevant as a measure of anything.

It's totally, completely and utterly relevant as a measure of Apple's prowess in _retail_.

It's insufficient information for that.

Without knowing how much the stores cost to setup & run you can't guess the margin.