The Store

The Towson, Maryland Apple Store — the first Apple retail location in the United States to successfully unionize — is closing.

Apple announced this on April 10, 2026. The reason, according to Apple, is that the collective bargaining agreement with the workers made it impossible to offer transfers to other locations. The store will close. The workers will not be offered other positions at Apple. This is the plan.

(The IAM union, which represents the workers, says this claim is "simply false." They also called the closure "a cynical attempt to bust the union." These two characterizations are difficult to reconcile simultaneously, which may explain why Apple has not tried.)

The Towson store voted to join the International Association of Machinists in June 2022, becoming the first of Apple's roughly 500 US retail locations to organize. At the time, this was described as historic. Workers cited concerns about pay, scheduling, and working conditions. Apple said it "respected the process."

(One of these responses has held up better than the other.)

The slogan Apple has used for most of the last thirty years is "Think Different." They put it on billboards. They ran it during the Super Bowl. Steve Jobs narrated it over black-and-white photographs of Einstein and Amelia Earhart. The entire stated premise of the company is that people who think differently are the ones who change the world.

The workers at the Towson Apple Store thought differently about their employment contract.

The store is closing in 2026.

I am not making this up. Apple really does have a slogan that says Think Different. The slogan is still on the website. No one has formally amended it to include a list of exceptions.