Walgreen's Role In The Pharmaceutical Industry

Walgreens’ principal activity is to operate a chain of retail drugstores that sells prescription and nonprescription drugs. The company also carries additional product lines like general merchandise including cosmetics, food, beverages and photofinishing. Walgreens is one of the fastest growing retailers in the United States and led the chain drugstore industry in retail sales and profits last year.

Thank you Lord! I am very grateful to be able to successfully finish my third rotation at Walgreens pharmacy in Wellington, FL. My preceptor was Dr. Andrew Guvetis, a graduate from Nova Southern University and he has been working with Walgreens for a little over 2 years. During the first day, I noticed that this Walgreens was somewhat different from the others. It was designed like a wellness clinic where the pharmacist can spend some time during the day sitting on a desk right outside the pharmacy check-out counter and be accessible to answer any questions patients may have. It also had a big consultation room with comfy seating, a table including a sink and counter where a pharmacist can prepare immunizations or perform several screening tests. Walgreens offers health tests every day which help determine possible risks for heart disease or are looking for convenient ways to manage diabetes or high blood pressure. Some of the services offered include: cholesterol and blood pressure tests, body composition test and a comprehensive medication review. Test results are provided within minutes and it includes a pharmacist consultation as well.

At present Walgreens appears to be operating in a Horizontal Integration strategy demonstrated through its merger with Boots Alliance and a reported inquiry to purchase Rite-Aid. (Nichols, 2015) Market Penetration is another strategy which Walgreens is presently operating within. Their change in strategy to focus on the customer and improve customer service and relationships is one strategy that is being used to penetrate a market with vast competition that needs a differentiator to remain on top.

Walgreens Pharmacy operates in an Oligopoly market structure. The retail pharmacy environment also has the Oligopoly characteristic of significant entry barriers. The barriers are restriction of ownership and restriction of where the business can be established (Walgreens). The ownership barriers are established by the government and state only Pharmacists or an incorporated company that has directors and shareholder members that are registered pharmacists are allowed to open and own a pharmacy. Licensed pharmacists are required to be on duty during the hours of operations.

Shoppers Drug Mart Corporation is a subcategory of Loblaw Companies Limited as a licensor and full service drug store which was founded in 1962 in Toronto by Murray Koffler. This company has grown to a network of 1307 stores all over Canada and counting (cite).

Walgreens was founded in 1901 measuring 50 feet by 20 feet by Charles R. Walgreen, Sr.. Mr. Walgreen was born near Galesburg, Illinois and his family later relocated to Dixon, Illinois at town about 60 miles north of his birthplace. Mr. Walgreens’ father was a farmer who turned into a businessperson and saw a great potential of the Rock River Valley (Walgreen, n.d., p.1). At age 16, Charles Walgreen had his first experience working in a drug store. He didn’t always have pleasurable experiences but it was a job with pay. He had an accident at a shoe factory that cut off his left middle finger from the top joint. This injury also stops him from playing any sports at school. After a year and a half with the

One major weakness of Walgreens is their store layouts. Each store is not uniform this can become confusing for many consumers. Some stores have 9 isles while others have 10 isles. While new stores have well experience layouts, in these layouts the pharmacists sit in front of the pharmacy at a desk there to assist any customers. All the different layouts can be confusing to consumers especially the elderly who make up a big portion of Walgreens customers. While having a store on each corner can be strength, this can lead to difficult parking situations for customers. I know personally, when I leave work I have to take a different way home then I do coming to work since it is hard to make a left hand turn out the one side of the parking lot. This can be difficult for customers who need to make a left hand turn to return back to their home. They do not want to go around town just to get back to their house. A lost insurance company contract caused Walgreens to lose many customers. The lost contract was with Express Scripts, this was seen negatively by many customers. Tricare, a military insurance was a part of Express Scripts. Walgreens gained a bad name with military members with the loss of this contract. Currently, Walgreens does take certain Express Script insurances they do not take Tricare. I personally think that Walgreens lacks when training customers. Employees are usually the last one to find out about anything that is going on in the company. Also, employees find it hard to answer all of the customers’ questions properly. The last weakness is the high prices at Walgreens. They do not have as many products in the store to spread out the expenses so this leads to higher prices. Also, with convenience comes a higher price. A store like Meijer has a lot of products to spread expenses over to keep costs low. With the strategic alliance with Amerisource Bergen, Walgreens will be able to improve

Since 1901, Walgreens has had a strong passion for customer service. The founder, Charles Walgreens, goal was to create a drugstore that was like no other. He said that for as many drugstores as he had worked at, he had never worked for one that had a focus for good customer service and low prices. Walgreens has grown by leaps and bounds since 1901 and is now recognized as the leader in the market with over 7000 stores. Charles Walgreen had an eye for good managers. He said he was able to pick people that he knew were smarter than him so to promote them and make them the heads of his drugstores. As a store manager, not only is it your job to run a store which includes ordering, customer care, and inventory control, but also it is your

Knowing the importance of a strategic vision, every company undertakes a complete analysis periodically. In order to create a strategic plan the parties involved must know every aspect of the industry and the company at hand. The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the retail drugstore industry and then focus on Walgreens, the industry leader in terms of sales. As part of the in-depth analysis of Walgreens, its major competitors will also be described and analyzed. The retail drugstore industry consists of all those stores that contain a pharmacy and sell prescription drugs. It also includes businesses that sell prescription drugs online and through the mail. Most retail drugstores also offer other

Along with the company's strong market performance, the Walgreens Corporation continually shows considerable growth. 2006 ended with Walgreens' 32nd consecutive year of record sales and earnings ("Walgreen Co. reports..., 2006). Walgreens' 2005 sales of $47.4 were a 12.5% increase over the previous year and over $1.5 billion in earnings were a 15.5% increase over the previous year (Walgreens Corporation, 2006a). Furthermore, a new Walgreens store opens approximately every 19 hours (Carpenter, 2004). Consequently, the Walgreens name carries considerable brand equity as a nationwide retailer known for quality and convenience. In fact, Walgreens has positioned itself as the drugstore offering the most convenience (Walgreens Corporation, 2006c). As such, Walgreens offers drive-thru pharmacies in over 80% of its stores, and nearly 30% of stores are open 24 hours a day (Walgreens Corporation, 2006a). The company strives to offer a merchandise mix in line with this focus, providing customers with one-stop stopping for not only prescription drugs,

The competitive prices, countless discount opportunities, and friendly employees keep customers loyal to Walgreens even if they are not making frequent visits to the pharmacy department. This paper seeks to analyze the different components of the drug store industry and the aspects of the marketing strategy of the Walgreens Company that have kept it a strong competitor for so many years.

Walgreens has attempted to build satisfaction, value, and loyalty for their customers by remembering that loyal customers are at the heart of their business, and thus rely on a customer-on-top business model. To do this, Walgreens has learned the talent of listening and responding to their customers in the following ways: (1) to respond to the busy lives of their customers, Walgreens allowed them to fill prescriptions at different stores and offered them the drive-thru pharmacy; (2) customers who spoke other languages complained about the labels, and Walgreens responded by printing labels in more than 10 different languages; and (3) when customers with eyesight problems could not read the labels, Walgreens offered printed labels with larger font sizes so that customers could more easily read the bigger text (Berenbaum, n.d., para. 19).

Placed within an industry being pressured by reimbursement rates, plagued by market saturation, and in constant fear of government legislation, Walgreens is trying to pursue new avenues to promote company growth. In order to promote market share growth in New York, Walgreens acquired the drugstore chain Duane Reade in 2010 (WAG to Acquire NY Institution Duane Reade, 2010). Walgreens also recently expanded their online presence in May of 2011 with the acquisition of drugstore.com (Walgreens Co.). While Walgreens also focuses on traditional organic store growth, these actions exemplify their large focus on promoting company growth through new avenues.

The idea of Walgreens started off in the early 1900’s in a small town called Dixon, Illinois. Charles R. Walgreen started working at a drug store, due to an accident that happened at a shoe making company, ending his athletic career. He realized after working in this small town he needed to go somewhere bigger to pursue his dreams of becoming a pharmacist. He chose to go to Chicago to open up his first store on the south side of the city. By 1910,

From 2002 to 2005, Walgreens reported a compounded annual growth rate of 10.1%, growing to $42.2 billion in total revenues. This strong revenue growth was primary driven by organic expansion through new store openings. Since 2002, Walgreens has added 1070 net new stores (22% increase) while CVS has added 1,384 net new stores (25% increase), of which 86%, or 1200 of CVS' store additions, were due to the 2004 acquisition of Eckerd. As a result, although CVS reported an impressive 21% increase in sales from 2004 to 2005 compared to Walgreens 12.5% (a decline from 15.3% in 2003 to 2004), it was primarily due to CVS experiencing the full effect of the mid-2004 acquisition of the 1200 Eckerd stores. Table 3 shows the year-over-year comparison of Walgreens total revenues to CVS'.