have told a local television station that clerks refused to sell them Apple merchandise after hearing them speaking Farsi.
Sahar Sabet, a US citizen and University of Georgia student, said an Apple Store employee at the North Point Mall in Alpharetta refused to sell her an iPad last Thursday after hearing her and her uncle talking.
The clerk asked what they were speaking. “When we said, ‘Farsi, I’m from Iran,’ he said, ‘I just can’t sell this to you. Our countries have bad relations,’” Sabet told WSB-TV.
A manager at the mall later showed the station Apple’s policy, which states that the exportation, sale or supply from the US to Iran of any Apple goods is strictly prohibited without the US government’s advance authorization. A State Department spokesman later told the station it is also illegal to travel to Iran with laptops or satellite cellphones without US Treasury Department approval.
But the sanction on sales applies to exports, and a sale in an Atlanta store is not an export.
Zack Jafarzadeh, who is from Virginia, told the TV station he was denied service at the Apple Store in the Perimeter Mall outside Atlanta while trying to help a friend buy an iPhone. He said his friend is from Iran and studying in the Atlanta area.
“I feel like this is a bit of racial profiling against Iranians and I’m appalled,” said Jafar-zadeh.
After her “very hurtful, very embarrassing” experience, Sabet said she called Apple corporate customer relations and an apologetic employee told her she could buy an iPad online.
Sabet told WSB-TV the iPad she was trying to buy was to be a gift for her cousin, who lives in Iran. She wasn’t asked if she planned to seek a Treasury Department license to export it.
A WSB-TV reporter went back to the store where Sabet had tried to buy the iPad. The clerk identified by Sabet told the reporter the company policy was not to sell to anyone from Iran—although that is not what the written corporate policy shown to the reporter says.
Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said, “Apple must revise its policies to ensure that customers do not face discriminatory treatment based on their religion, ethnicity or national origin.”