I empathise with you. Dismissing this oaf was the right thing to do, though I would have asked to see his superordinate and made a formal complaint.
I think that you are probably right that female clients probably receive this appalling treatment more often than male ones do, however it does happen to males, too. I know because I've had it happen to me as a client and I've seen many fellow sales staff who, for whatever reason, choose to act that way. I am totally unimpressed, for instance, by having sales staff answer a question about a product by reading what it says on the box - as though I am illiterate or stupid. Clearly, many of them have little or no product knowledge worth a jot.
I am no longer in retail work though I spent much time both as a sales-person and managing retail shops. The Apple Stores certainly have some quaint idiosyncracies that are, in my view, both unnecessary and unproductive. Even so, when it comes to selling, your experience is evidence of the need for sales people to listen to and assist the client to satisfy their needs - as well as their wants.
No, I don't at all mean that such justifies pushing AppleCare or any other item onto a client. However, I mostly worked with photographic and hi-fi sales and, not unlike computers, there was a wide range of equipment both in terms of quality and complexity.
In the earlier part of my career I was often criticised for 'selling down' to clients. That is, I asked them about what they wished to do, tactfully attempted to discover what sort of knowledge & expertise they had and whether they had a particular budget in mind. - What I often found was that in many more cases than one might imagine, clients had a false idea of their needs, usually based on advertising & advice from 'knowledgeable' friends.
In those cases I could have gone along with their first expressed choice of product and ignored the reality that, in most cases, they would be spending more than was necessary and purchasing an item that exceeded their needs and often their level of mastery.
Of course, if they were simply definite and insisted that a particular product was what they wanted, then I would not argue. However, in the majority of cases, I could offer them alternatives which would better suit their aims and their level of ability to operate the equipment.
The result of working in this way, as well as being willing to spend time on necessary instruction or pitfalls to avoid, was that I built a reputation as someone who could be trusted. - The result was that my clients would return, again and again. They would return for accessories and when ready and able, to upgrade. An outcome for myself was that I consistently topped sale figures.
Unfortunately, today's materialist culture and desire to always have the latest and best is very prevalent. I guess that my 'old-fashioned' attitude of putting 'need' before 'desire' might no longer be accepted at all. If so, that is a shame for your experience is an excellent example of what happens when sales-people don't listen or even care about what a client is telling them.
In conclusion, I'd just say that this sort of experience is not confined to AppleStores or even just to sales. Sadly, there seems to me to be an ever increasing insularity of people, a lack of caring, a speed to judgment and a failure to listen *attentively* to what others are actually saying. For me, it reflects a sickness in our society which underpins, at least in part, much of the detrimental, hateful and wrongful bias and prejudice that remains so rife.
