What's a retail employee worth to Apple?

Every time you walk into an Apple store and are greeted by one of those friendly badged employees you might see someone who wants to help you with your question or grab you the latest Apple product, but when Apple looks at that same employee they see 320,000 George Washingtons.

That's right, each Apple retail employee is worth an average of US$320,000 in revenue per year to Apple. That's according to Horace Dediu from Asymco who got that number from combining information from ifoAppleStore and Apple's quarterly reports.

If you look more closely at his report you'll note that the $320,000 figure is for 2011 and that its much lower than the $481,000 per employee Apple brought in in 2010. However, Dediu only calculated the first three calendar quarters in 2011, so by the end of this month after holiday sales are done, each Apple retail employee is now probably worth more than half a million dollars to Apple. And with 30,000 retail employees across the globe, that's a lot of cheddar.