Used to work at an AppleCare call centre. Apple has extremely high standards for their support advisors. I'm aware that the genius bars are terrible, though.

I never went into an Apple store, but the phone support issues I had (even a pretty complex bug on their end that locked me out of my account) where handled swiftly and well, and I spoke to humans that seemed to know what they're doing. I could say this should be the default and I shouldn't be impressed by it, but unfortunately it's top 10% based on my experience. I'm in Europe though, maybe they do things differently here.