Apple Closed Three U.S. Stores on June 20, Including Its Unionized Towson Location

Apple permanently closed Apple Trumbull in Connecticut, Apple North County in California, and Apple Towson Town Center in Maryland on June 20. When it announced the decision, the company pointed to the departure of other retailers and worsening conditions at the malls that hosted all three locations.

Towson made the decision more consequential than an ordinary retail reshuffle. Employees there became Apple’s first unionized retail workforce in the United States in 2022. Apple said workers at Trumbull and North County would continue their roles at nearby stores, while Towson employees would be eligible to apply for open jobs under the collective bargaining agreement.

The history behind that sentence goes back to June 2022, when workers at Towson Town Center voted to be represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, organizing under the banner of the Coalition of Organized Retail Employees. It was the first successful union vote at an Apple Store in the United States, and it came during a wider wave of service-sector organizing that had begun at a Starbucks in Buffalo months earlier and spread to other consumer brands. A second Apple store, in Oklahoma City, voted to organize later that year with a different union.

Towson’s status also explains why Apple’s statement referred to a collective bargaining agreement rather than to company policy. Once workers ratified a contract, the terms governing layoffs, transfers and severance at that location stopped being a matter of internal practice and became negotiated obligations. That is a meaningful legal difference, and it is part of why the two sides could describe the same treatment in such different language: Apple pointed to the agreement, the union to what it says employees at the other two stores were offered instead.

That distinction led the union to treat the closure as more than a real-estate story. IAM CORE said it was outraged and argued that Apple was denying an organized store the relocation treatment offered elsewhere. Apple did not accept that interpretation and framed the move as a response to declining mall conditions, not as a judgment on organized labor.

American labor law is more permissive on this point than the rhetoric on either side suggests. Under the Supreme Court’s 1965 Darlington decision, an employer is generally free to shut part of its business, but a partial closing carried out to discourage organizing at the locations that remain can be unlawful. The practical obstacle is proving motive, which is why disputes of this kind usually turn on documents and timing rather than on what either party says in public.

There is also a structural consequence that neither statement addresses. A bargaining unit in American retail is certified at a specific location, so when the location closes the unit closes with it. Employees hired at other stores generally arrive as unrepresented workers, and any organizing effort has to begin again from scratch. Whatever the reason for the decision, the effect on union density across Apple’s retail fleet is the same.

The property side of the story is equally well documented. Class-B American shopping malls have been losing anchor tenants and foot traffic for well over a decade, through a succession of department-store bankruptcies, and retailers with the leverage to move have spent those years relocating to street-level and open-air formats. Apple has followed that pattern visibly, and three closures set against a United States fleet numbering in the hundreds is a small adjustment by any ordinary measure.

Apple Retail grew up inside that mall system. When the first stores opened in 2001, enclosed shopping centers were where a computer company went to reach shoppers who were not already looking for it, and the inline mall unit remained the default format for years. The flagship glass boxes and open-air locations came later, as the economics reversed. A store closing at a struggling mall is, in that sense, the tail end of a shift Apple began making a decade ago.

What each side would need to establish is therefore quite different. The union’s case depends on a pattern, meaning evidence that organized locations are treated systematically worse than comparable stores. Apple’s case rests on the mall record, which is documented and largely uncontested. Neither is settled by a single closure, and a disagreement of this kind is more often argued in filings than resolved by press statements.

The closures are now complete, but the prudent conclusion remains narrower than either side’s rhetoric. The public record establishes both the malls’ difficulties and Towson’s special labor status; it does not by itself prove whether the decision was purely about property or also served a broader labor purpose.