Despite having posted the quite favorable 2009 second quarter results, there are indications that Apple is cutting costs in order to battle out the impact of the still-ongoing financial meltdown - laying-off full-time retail employees being one of the practical measures undertaken by the company.

In its 10-Q form filed with the SEC, Apple has made a mention of 14,000 full-time retail employees at the end of the last quarter; though the number of employees mentioned in the same document, for the December 2008 quarter, was 15,600.

It is possible that the slashed number of workers could have resulted from their shifting to part-time status, or even laying-off of the excess personnel employed during the holiday quarter. Nonetheless, the fact that the reduced number of workers is over 10 percent of Apple's total retail workforce, it seems quite likely that 1,600 employees have actually been laid-off!

Furthermore, the reduced number of workers also correlates to other figures that Apple revealed about its retail segment. The company opened merely one store in the 2009 second-quarter of 2009, as against four stores opened a year earlier.

In addition, Apple's year-over-year retail revenue also plunged to an average of $7 million per store in the recent quarter from an average of $8.5 million per store in the corresponding quarter of 2008.