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D/b/a '''Walgreens''' (without an
Apostrophe ), is a
Pharmacy Chain , mail service pharmacy,
Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM) , and specialty pharmacy which has operations throughout the continental
United States and
Puerto Rico . There are more than 5,800 Walgreens in operation with a current goal to have 7,000 stores by 2010. Of the 5,800+ Walgreens locations, about 2,000 of them are open 24-hours, including the pharmacy. Over 4 million customers are served by Walgreens daily chain-wide and over 500 million prescription scripts are filled annually. Walgreens was founded in
Chicago, Illinois , in 1901 and has since expanded throughout the United States. Its headquarters is located in
Deerfield, Illinois , a
Suburb of
Chicago . Its main competitors are
CVS/pharmacy ,
Wal-Mart ,
Rite Aid as well as
Target Corporation and primarily
Osco .
A typical Walgreens store is about 14,500 square feet with 11,000 square feet of sales area. They offer nearly 25,000 items for sale and typically staff between 25 and 30 people per store. On average, one store pulls in $7.9 million in annual sales. Most stores include a pharmacy, a photo lab, a cosmetics counter, and a general merchandise area. Select stores in metropolitan Chicago,
Atlanta ,
Kansas City ,
Las Vegas , and
St. Louis now include Walgreens Health Corner Clinics where certified staff diagnose, treat, and prescribe for common illnesses and can also issue vaccinations and physicals in select locations. These clinics are open 7 days a week; including evenings and weekends with no appointments necessary and with acceptance of most major insurance plans.
The Walgreens chain began as a drug store owned by took over and ran the chain until his retirement. The Charles R. Walgreen Jr. years were relatively prosperous, but lacked the massive expansion seen in the early part of the company. Charles "Cork" R. Walgreen III took over after Jr's retirement in the early 1970s, and brought the company through many modern initiatives, including the switch to a computer inventory based system (bar code scanning). The Walgreen family was not involved in senior management of the company for a short period following Charles' retirement. In 1995,
Kevin P. Walgreen was made a vice-president and promoted to Senior Vice-President of Operations - Southern Division in 2006.
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Walgreens formerly owned
Sanborns , the largest
Pharmacy chain in
Mexico , having purchased Sanborns from Frank Sanborn in 1946 and selling it to
Grupo Carso in 1985.
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In the 1980s, Walgreens owned and operated a chain of casual family restaurants named
Wag's , a belated attempt to compete with
Woolworth’s lunch counters. The Wag's restaurants were very similar in concpet to
Denny's . Walgreens sold most of these to
Marriott Corporation in 1988
COMPANY NEWS; Marriott to Buy 91 Wag's Restaurants, New York Times, June 30, 1988 and by 1991 the chain had completely gone out of business.
Walgreens is a sponsor of the
Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and co-produced the
Ron Santo documentary ''
This Old Cub .''
Walgreens claims responsibility for the popularization of the malted had been around for some time before. This development coincided with the invention of the
Electric Blender in the same year.
Walgreens opened its 3000th store in Chicago in 2000. Its 4000th store opened in 2003 in
Van Nuys, California , and most recently Walgreens opened its 5000th store in Richmond, Virginia in October of 2005.
Walgreens recently acquired the
Happy Harry's chain of Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey.
In 2003 Walgreens purchased 16 locations of the
Vancouver, Washington based
Hi-School Pharmacy Inc. stores, including the original Hi-School Pharmacy location in Vancouver, and converted them to Walgreens.
With the notable exceptions mentioned above, Walgreens expansion is different than that of competitors
CVS/pharmacy and
Rite Aid in that the company mostly expands by opening new stores in new markets instead of takeovers and acquisitions. This may actually benefit Walgreens in the long run, as both CVS and Rite Aid have experienced problems with this. CVS now has duplicate stores in
Chicagoland after acquiring
Albertsons 's
Osco Drugs chain while Rite Aid has several duplicate stores in the
Mid-Atlantic region (more notably
Pennsylvania ) after its recent acqusition of
Eckerd Pharmacy , and was only forced to sell off or close a handful of stores to meet regulations. Walgreens did buy a Rite Aid location in
Zelienople, Pennsylvania , as well as 5 other locations as a result of the Eckerd/Rite Aid deal.
On
July 12 ,
2006 ,
David Bernauer stepped down as CEO of Walgreens and was replaced by company president,
Jeff Rein . Holding degrees in accounting and pharmacy from the University of Arizona, Rein was a pharmacist, store manager, district manager, and treasurer prior to being named
Chief Executive Officer and
Chairman Of The Board . Greg Wasson, former President of Walgreens Health Services, was named President and Chief Operations Officer.
See Also: Walgreens Health Services
, mail service pharmacy,
Home Care , and [pecialty pharmacy services. Its primary division,
Walgreens Health Initiatives (WHI) , is a
PBM whose client list contains over 400 health plans, employer groups, third parties, unions, government entities, and other types of organizations. WHI currently covers the prescription insurance benefits of 13.5 million individuals in a retail network of over 63,000 pharmacies.
Walgreens at a street intersection.]]
Originally, Walgreens stores were connected to local grocerys, for example in Chicago, which is Walgreens primary market, they teamed up with either
Eagle Food Centers or
Dominick's Finer Foods, usually with a "walkthru" to the ajoining store and often sharing personell. This concept was instated to compete with the popular dual store format used by chief competitor
Jewel-Osco . Eventually, they ended the relationship with Eagle and focused primarily on a connection to the Dominick's stores, which were considered to be of a better quality. PharmX-
Rexall stepped in and filled the vacated Walgreen locations joined to Eagle stores.
In it's current business model, however, new Walgreens locations are most commonly set up as freestanding locations at the corners of busy, intersecting streets -- literally making it a "corner drugstore" similar to how many independent pharmacies evolved over the years in the United States. This also usually allows the store to offer additional conveniences such as a drive-thru pharmacy and 24-hour shopping that would not be possible in the average
Shopping Mall . Walgreens also offers "auto refill". Customers can have their prescriptions automatically refilled each month for no additional charge. Walgreens sells freshly brewed drip coffees,
Icee s, and fountain beverages at select stores, as part of the pilot "Café W" program. 1500 stores have equipment to refill inkjet cartridges, with an additional 1500 stores rolling out refilling equipment later this year. As of March 2007, Walgreens has introduced flat pricing, $10 for black, and $15 for color.
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- Walgreens is the nation's leading drugstore in sales, earnings, growth, same-store sales increases, prescription drug market share, and prescription sales per store, and first on the list of Global Most Admired Companies in the food and drugstore category. {Link without Title}
- Walgreens opens on average one store every 17 hours. Oral Testimony on E-Prescribing
- The company plans to have 7000 stores by 2010. Careers Page
- Walgreens fills over one million prescriptions every day Oral Testimony on E-Prescribing
- Nearly 30% of Walgreens stores are open 24-hours Oral Testimony on E-Prescribing
- Walgreens accounts for 14% of all retail prescriptions dispensed in the United States Oral Testimony on E-Prescribing
- Walgreens has invested more than $1 billion in advanced systems and technology {Link without Title}
- Walgreens is the largest private user of satellite transmission data in the world, second only to the U. S. Government {Link without Title}
- Walgreens was the first drug store chain to utilize drive through pick up windows for prescriptions.
- Walgreens is essentially debt-free. {Link without Title}
