Apple Stores: Grand openings roundup

Apple is relentlessly building new retail stores around the world as the company strives to deliver on the promise of building thirty new stores before the end of the September quarter. A set of brand spanking new stores will open in the United Kingdom, United States, Italy, Germany and China. Here’s a quick laundry list of the upcoming stores.

Braehead, Glasgow, Scotland – Located at the Braehead Shopping Centre, about 15 minutes northwest of city centre, this will be the second Apple store to grace Glasgow in Scotland (the other one being the Buchanan Street store) and Apple’s 33rd brick-and-mortar location in the U.K.

Image credit: ifoAppleStore

Stratford City, London, United Kingdom – Tuesday saw grand opening of the Stratford City store located inside London’s two-million-square-foot Westfield Stratford City mall, the largest shopping center in Europe. The mall will also double as the gateway to the future 2012 Olympic Village and stadium in eastern London and Apple should benefit tremendously from the Olympics traffic spike come next summer.

Image credit: MacRumors

Via Rizzoli, Bologna, Italy – In addition to the Campania store north of Naples in Italy’s Caserta province (Apple’s hundredth store outside the U.S.), Italy will get another store in Bologna’s Via Rizolli this coming Saturday. The country’s eighth Apple store is adorned with the painstakingly restored façade which fits the historic corner building beautifully. SetteB.IT explains that it ill be the first Apple store in the country outside a shopping mall.

Image credit: SetteB.IT

Catania, Sicily, Italy – Although Apple’s retail site doesn’t list this store yet, iSpazio.net has it on good authority that this store will surface inside the Center Sicily shopping mall, which is located in the district of La Tenutella. Grand opening should be September 24, the site reported. It is interesting that in September alone Italy becomes the home to three new Apple stores: the Casert, Campania store that opened September 3, the aforementioned Bologna store due September 17 and this new Sicily location.

Image credit: iSpazio.net

Three more big stores right after the break.

Cielo Vista Mall, El Paso, Texas – The upcoming Apple store in the 1.2 million square-foot Cielo Vista Mall is located just two miles from the Mexico border town of Ciudad Juarez. As we explained earlier, this store is the first Texas store west of San Antonio, positioned right next to the Gap store on the ground floor of the shopping mall which is located along Interstate 10 on east side of El Paso. According to El Paso Times, the store will open on the mall’s lower level, next to the Coach store near the JCPenney department store.

Image credit: El Paso Times

Nanjing Road East, Shanghai, China – A property management official told Chinese tech site DoNews that Apple’s massive new Shanghai store could open September 20. Located at the corner of Nanjing Road East and Henan Zhong Lu, within walking distance of Shanghai’s skyscraper panorama, this will be China’s biggest store. It will include four floors of retails space and M.I.C. gadget thinks first floor will be for product demos and sales, with second floor dedicated to Genius Bar and customer programs. The third and fourth floor should house support for business customers and backend operations, respectively. The Nanjing Road East store will be Apple’s fifth retail store in mainland China or sixth if you include the upcoming Hong Kong store at IFC center, scheduled to open September 24.

Image credit: M.I.C. gadget

Jungfernstieg, Hamburg, Germany – As we already noted, Germany will get its seventh store this coming Saturday, in the heart of Hamburg next to the Alster lake and right on Jungfernstieg, the city’s famous shopping street. The wide, two-level store is about eight miles south of the existing Alstertal store and will become Hamburg’s second Apple retail location. Hamburg itself is Germany’s second-largest city and the seventh-largest in the European Union with population of over 1.8 million people, or 4.3 million people for the Hamburg Metropolitan Region that includes parts of the neighboring Federal States of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein.

Image credit: alkr.com