For one of the most profitable companies in the world, this doesn't seem outrageous (1 extra employee per store, maybe full time, likely not) especially given the fact that Apple doesn't support right-to-repair they will naturally have more foot traffic than most similar businesses.
The law is not going to work if it says “the most profitable companies need to pay for 2 people when 1 will do”. And then how does it work if profits fluctuate?
It is simply much easier for the government to pay to accomplish whatever goal it wants, and at the same time does not obfuscate the price of achieving that goal. If the government wants to help deaf people be employed, then the government should pay an interpreter to help the deaf person be employed.
Is that not much simpler than arbitrarily requiring various other entities to comply with nebulous requirements and then spend resources policing them?
Of course, it is cheaper for the government to do the latter, and then spend more money policing them since in the former situation, it is easy to project how much the government will need to spend, and in the latter, the government can use some bullshit assumptions to make up whatever budget they want.
Examples: People at road construction sites holding "Stop" signs, packagers in supermarkets, money collectors in toll booths (even before electronic devices, just using a machine was easily and cheaply possible and frequently and successfully used elsewhere), and a few other jobs that appeared to be unnecessary and purely intended to keep some people busy.
Things like that, and how the defense budget is actually used as a jobs program in large parts, were quite eye opening for me. I came from former East Germany and we always thought US as the most capitalist of all places, but when I first visited for a few months of travel not long after reunification I was very surprised to find some things that we in East Germany even used in jokes comparing East and West, and now I found out that e.g. "employee of the month" (with a special parking lot no less), that we thought was a typical socialism thing, and we even had a joke about that which implied and presumed that something like that could never exist in a country such as the US, was something they actually had. Also, the reverence to uniforms (military and police especially) was very East German.
I think the US is confused about how capitalist they really are. Under the hood they try to solve the same problems as everybody else and come up with very similar solutions, only that they need be be branded differently because you can't do any "socialism" openly.
I think the ultimate truth is that we humans are all just super fucking tribal. For all our chest thumping and moralistic justifying about how our philosophy and way of life are better than everyone else, it really all comes down to "I want my tribe to be the most powerful" and we'll sacrifice any and all of our ideals to make that happen. Or maybe more accurately, those tribes that actually hold strong to their ideals don't have what it takes to become the most powerful.
How that game between tribes plays out is a never ending cat and mouse game of shifting narrative, demographics, environmental conditions, technology, and tribal affiliations.
"Capitalism is better than socialism/communism" was only ever a narrative to justify why we in the west were top dogs getting fat and happy while those in the east were struggling to survive. The truth of why that happened is a lot more complicated.
