What you need to know
- Apple's retail location in Charleston, South Carolina has temporarily closed due to COVID-19.
- Over twenty employees were exposed to the virus.
- The store will remain closed until next week.
Apple has temporarily closed one of its retail locations due to a COVID-19 exposure.
As reported by Bloomberg, the Apple Store in Charleston, South Carolina has temporarily closed after twenty of its employees were exposed to COVID-19. According to the store's website, the company plans to reopen the location next week.
The store's website shows it will be closed until next week, with a sign on the front of the location also alerting customers to the shutdown. Stores of the Charleston location's size typically have 70 to 80 staff members, suggesting that about a quarter of employees were exposed. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.Apple has opened and closed its retail stores several times during the pandemic due to Covid-19 concerns. But this move -- shutting down a location due to a rash of employees exposed to the virus -- is rare.
Like every company on earth, Apple has been struggling to return to some semblance of normalcy with all of its operations since the start of the pandemic. The company has continuously opened and closed retail stores as COVID-19 cases rise and fall in areas around the world. The 270 stores in the United States have been mostly open since June.
While the stores have been open, things are certainly not back to normal. Just this week, the company scrapped plans to bring Today at Apple sessions, the company's in-store training classes, back into its retail stores across a number of countries due to the rise of the Delta variant.
The company also delayed plans to return corporate employees to the office from September to October. Apple is also doubling the frequency of COVID-19 testing for all of its employees across corporate and retail.
