Apple has closed nearly 100 stores globally since December 14, including in London, California, and Tennessee, as COVID-19 cases surge
Michael Steeber / 9to5Mac :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second full swing of Apple's reopen-close pendulum in 2020. After reopening nearly 100 global locations by May, the company was forced to re-shut 77 US stores by July as cases spiked in the South and Southwest — the same trigger now behind the December wave.
What makes this round different is timing and geography: closures hitting London, California, and Tennessee land squarely in the holiday shopping quarter, and they span two continents at once rather than a regional cluster. The pattern would recur a year later, when Apple closed stores in Miami, Annapolis, and Ottawa over employee COVID-19 cases and exposures rather than community spread.
First-order effects
- Retail employees at the affected locations shift back to uncertain schedules or reduced hours during the highest-traffic weeks of Apple's fiscal year, while in-store holiday demand is pushed onto apple.com and curbside pickup.
Second-order effects
- Each closure cycle validates Apple's decision to keep treating physical stores as flexible capacity rather than fixed infrastructure — the same fleet that reopened on a rolling basis in May can be idled within days, so rivals' holiday retail bets carry more fixed risk than Apple's.
Third-order effects
- If the open-close-reopen loop keeps repeating, Apple's retail network settles into an episodic operating model where store staffing, inventory, and services are planned around interruption as the default, not the exception — a structure the July wave of 30 additional US closures already foreshadowed.
The trend: Apple's retail strategy is converging on a hybrid model in which stores flex open and closed with local case counts while digital channels absorb the displaced demand.