Apple Recloses All California Stores Since Saturday Morning

Effective as of Saturday, December 19th, all California Apple Retail Store locations will be closing again, with most of the locations for the third time. This statewide closure of Apple Stores temporarily comes after Southern California hospitals reports that their ICU bed capacity is depleted, and the expansion of the regional stay-at-home order to the rest of the state.


Considering these metrics and additional restrictions in the state of California, Los Angeles County Apple Store locations announced that they are closing their doors first, then other counties in Southern California followed suit. The Bay Area and Northern California locations were the last locations to publicly update their operating hours. Two locations in Southern California closed already since Friday, but all locations are still accepting existing online orders, shopping appointments and Genius Bar appointments until December 22nd.

Therefore, before the third closures, Apple has reversed operations on their stores by retrofitting all of the locations to Express storefronts, eliminating walk-in customers and requiring customers to have a reservation for Genius Bar or “Shop with a Specialist”, and to pick up their online orders. These changes came by when the third coronavirus surge prompted California Governor Gavin Newsom to enact a regional shut down in early December after he changed the Blueprint to A Safer Economy tiers of almost every county to the purple tier. All customers can get their Apple products for the holidays through the Apple Online Store during the new store closures and still can get their products delivered to their doors by Christmas when they place it by the deadline or with 2-hour, same-day courier delivery.

(Update: As of this publishing, Apple has also closed stores in the UK that are in the 4th tier, including London. The company also closed stores in Latin America and parts of Europe for the third time as COVID cases risen during the holiday season. These closures had already started on the 20th of December.)
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