Walgreens is Chicago’s largest publicly traded company, founded in 1901 on Chicago’s South Side by Charles R. Walgreen Sr.
Our hometown drugstore chain is one of the world’s largest now, wildly successful over the past century-plus if measured by size. But these are dark days for the global behemoth. Walgreens is in need of some urgent care of its own.
It’s struggling so much, in fact, that CEO Roz Brewer, a Black female executive whose 2021 hiring was hailed as a symbolically important event in this town and nationally, resigned Aug. 31 under apparent pressure from the board. This week, Walgreens named health care industry veteran Tim Wentworth as its new CEO.
The 63-year-old Wentworth has a solid track record in one of the fields Walgreens has found challenging — negotiating drug prices with pharmacy-benefit managers. Wentworth’s last job was running Express Scripts, one of the country’s largest such managers, now a part of Cigna. He’s been on the other side of the table from the Walgreens of the world, presumably giving him some insight into how better to deal with the Cignas of the world.
But troublesome middlemen are hardly Walgreens’ only problem. Under Brewer, it centered its growth prospects on acquiring health care practices. Walgreens already offers to take care of your basic medical needs like vaccinations, strep tests and such. It wants to do that for a lot more of you than it’s doing now.
And then there’s the business most of us have experienced many times: retail. Walgreens is struggling there, too.
One issue is as basic as it gets. Walgreens is having trouble staffing its stores. It’s paying substantial one-time hiring bonuses to attract pharmacists in certain markets.
Last week, pharmacists in what organizers said were 300 or so Walgreens stores around the country walked off the job in protest of working conditions and lack of staffing. The company said the disruption was minimal but acknowledged the legitimate concerns of those pharmacists.
From the micro to the macro, Chicago has a lot at stake in its largest locally based corporation getting its act together.
Locally, during a recent visit to a South Side Walgreens, the pharmacist closed the pharmacy window in the middle of the day without notice, saying a lack of staffing made it impossible to serve the long line of customers. Senior citizens waiting patiently in line for their prescriptions said it was the second day in a row that had happened.
That’s not simply inconvenient. We’re talking about the health of patients relying on that Walgreens for their meds.
Likewise, long lines at Walgreens are simply the norm. Unlike archrival CVS, most Walgreens don’t have self-checkout options. That leads inevitably to longer wait times to purchase basics like paper towels, toothpaste, etc.
While Walgreens is short-staffed on the front lines, pink slips have been flying in the back office. The company’s financial woes — operating earnings in the fiscal year just ended were down 21% from the previous year — led to more than 500 corporate-staff layoffs in the summer. Most of those were people working at the Deerfield headquarters or in Chicago.
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Mr. Wentworth, you’ve got your work cut out for you, and we’re rooting for you. We’ve got a vested interest in the fortunes of one of our most important locally based companies, just from a parochial point of view.
But Walgreens is more than just one of those corporate names slapped on a building downtown or right off the expressway. It’s a critical local employer and a retailer with which virtually all of us have a personal relationship of one kind or another. A thriving and well-operated Walgreens is important to Chicago economically and good for our health, from every city neighborhood to our most far-flung suburbs.
Let’s get this fixed.
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