The Journal. - The Collapse of Walgreens

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

Not much has gone right for Walgreens. Facing tough headwinds, the brand has been playing catch up to other U.S. pharmacy retailers for years. WSJ’s Joseph Walker on what went wrong for Walgreens and the private equity deal that could sell the company for parts. Further Reading: - Walgreens Goes From $100 Billion Health Giant to Private-Equity Salvage Project  - The Walgreens Billionaire Watching His Empire Come Apart  Further Listening: - How Target Got Off Target  - What Went Wrong at Bed Bath & Beyond?  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Walgreens, the store with the red squiggly W, has been an American institution for more than a century. It's a place where you can fill your prescriptions, buy deodorant, toothpaste, shampoo, or pick up a pint of ice cream late at night. And it's everywhere. 70% of Americans live within five miles of a Walgreens-owned pharmacy. But this American institution is now at risk of falling apart. Walgreens, which has been a publicly traded company for close to 100 years, agreed to

sell itself to a private equity firm called Sycamore Partners for about $10 billion or something like $90 billion less than it was worth about 10 years ago. That's our colleague Joseph Walker. He's watched Walgreens go from a company worth more than a hundred billion dollars down to worth ten billion dollars today. You know, a great American brand over 100 years old, you know, really have this sort of ignominious demise or decline over the past, you know, five, ten years in the way that it struggled to adapt to the market forces

that were affecting its competitors, but didn't quite end up moving in the right direction. You can add into it the Italian billionaire who stepped in and tried to help with that turnaround and so far has also failed to make it happen. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Kate Leimbach. It's Monday, March 10th. Coming up on the show, the collapse of Walgreens. Whether you own a bustling hair salon or a hot new bakery, you need business insurance that can keep up with your evolving needs. With flexible coverage options from TV Insurance, you only pay for what you need. TD, ready for you. Walgreens was founded in Chicago in 1901.

That was the same year that President William McKinley was assassinated and Teddy Roosevelt took over. Roast beef cost 15 cents a pound and a dozen eggs cost less than a quarter. Ford's Model T wasn't even built yet. Walgreens was started by a man by the name of Walgreen, and he was a pharmacist. He bought up a local pharmacy store where he worked,

and the company expanded pretty fast. It went public in the 1920s. It was a very successful stock for a lot of years. And the company expanded pretty fast. It went public in the 1920s. It was a very successful stock for a lot of years. It was managed by descendants of the first Walgreens up and through the late 20th century. Early on, one of the things that sort of distinguished itself was that you know, they had a lunch counter and One of their people there came up with the malted milkshake, right? Which is like a sweeter version of your regular milkshake and that made it a big hit

They were the milkshake innovator to create the malted milkshake. It's true I feel like this is like, you know Americana trivia Like really good stuff. It is. It is. It's true. Walgreens kept growing. In the decades after, it would put pharmacies in neighborhoods across the country. And business boomed. Walgreens, the Pharmacy America Trust, for the nearest 24 hour location, call 1-800-WALGREENS.

To the point where today, you know, I think we all see where, you know, you go down the street and there's a Walgreens, then a couple blocks later there's another Walgreens, right? And then next to that is a CVS, and then another Walgreens a block and a half away. And the idea there just being that you want to just give customers as many chances as possible

to shop at a Walgreens. They implemented the drive-through pharmacy, We want to just give customers as many chances as possible to shop at a Walgreens. They implemented the drive-through pharmacy, which is obviously now pretty standard at many pharmacies in suburban type of areas. And it kept going, really. I mean, I think if we want to say the peak, probably going up until like 2010. I think the reimbursement pressures

that the company is facing now really start to pick up around then and then accelerate it. What do you mean by reimbursement pressure? They're getting paid less money than they were in the past, right? So every day they're going to pay a little bit less for the same prescriptions that they're dispensing. Pharmacy chains like Walgreens strike deals

with pharmacy benefit managers or PBMs. PBMs are businesses that set which medicines patients can get. And they are the ones that negotiate with pharmacies on reimbursement rates. In 2011, Walgreens tried to play hardball with one PBM. It wanted better terms from Express Scripts, but its tough tactics didn't work out.

And what happened there was, in any negotiation, right, it's all about leverage. And so for many years, you know, Walgreens could say, hey, we're Walgreens, we're everywhere. People love us, you know, like our customers, Walgreens could say, hey, we're Walgreens, we're everywhere. People love us, our customers love Walgreens. You've got to give us our terms or you can't exclude us from your network of pharmacies that you allow your patients to go to. And Express Scripts said, well, we're not so sure about that, and kicked them out of the network. And there was not a uproar among the customer base saying,

we want our Walgreens, we're loyal to Walgreens. People weren't storming the barricades necessarily. And that was sort of a big sign that maybe the pharmacies like Walgreens, despite their omnipresence, were not as powerful as had been thought before. Being kicked out of Express Scripts' network meant that Walgreens lost access to millions of customers, and it added more financial pressure on the company.

The next year, in 2012, Walgreens came up with a new solution. It hitched its wagon to a European pharmacy chain, Alliance Boots. The American retailer, Walgreens, has signed a deal to take a 45% stake in Alliance Boots, the parent company of the high street chain Boots. As part of this deal, which was completed in 2014, Walgreens got a new director and shareholder, an Italian businessman named

Stefano Pesina. Stefano is well known in Europe for being a very savvy businessman, from building up this small pharmaceutical distribution business into a Pemeth with properties across Europe, including the UK, France, and Italy, and so on. Piscina eventually became CEO, and he came up with a new plan for the company. One main focus was on its retail business. And I firmly believe that retail has a key role to play in improving life conditions, and not only in helping people live longer but also living health care.

And his idea was that well number one the front of the store we got to beef up the front of the store the front of the store meaning where you buy your candy, your chips, your batteries, your deodorants, right? But also your beauty supplies and making these stores into little comprehensive markets where you could go and pick up your prescription but also get anything else you need, right? And the idea there was that, you know, you offset the declining profit margins

in the back of the store, at the pharmacy, with the front of the store. profit margins in the back of the store at the pharmacy with the front of the store. Beyond retail, Pacino also had a prescription to help the pharmacy side of the business to buy up urgent care and primary care clinics. The other idea was to try to integrate more with the rest of the healthcare system. So let's buy up primary care, medical providers, or let's invest in urgent care providers and other health care companies. And then maybe we can attach them to our pharmacies, right? So you can not only get

your prescription at the pharmacy, but you can also see a doctor if you check to see if you have the flu or not. And so it was diversifying, expanding, acquiring in all these different areas sort of besides pharmacy. In a 2019 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Pasina said he was building a company that could last centuries. So Pasina has this strategy for how he can turn around Walgreens, how does it work out? Well, it doesn't work well enough to solve their problems at the pharmacy counter. What went wrong for Pasina and Walgreens pharmacy business struggling, CEO Stefano Pacina identified other areas that he thought could be more profitable. He tried beefing up its retail business with Walgreens branded merchandise.

And when you go back to like the 2012-2015 time frame from when Stefano and Walgreens first linked up, the thing that Stefano would talk about over and over again, right, is, look, the back of the store where we dispense the prescriptions, those margins are declining. You know, the American pharmacy business has had real rich margins for a long time, but that's declining. Now you've got to deal with that. And the way that you deal with it is the way that we dealt with it over in Europe, which was to make the front of the store into a desirable place to go shopping.

But there was a problem with this formula, online shopping. Aside from many other missteps that the company might've made there, just people were buying less and less inside of the store. People are much more likely to shop online. Pasina also tried other things. Walgreens bought thousands of Rite Aid stores. It acquired a couple doctors' office chains. But the deals added more debt and failed to stop

the pressure on its cash flow. Meanwhile, Walgreens and its rivals were searching for new solutions for their pharmacy businesses. Where everyone else zigged and Stefano zagged was not pulling off a big deal with an insurer. There was a period of time in the past, you know, five, 10 years where it seemed as though every big healthcare company was merging with another big healthcare company. And so, you know, the most direct competitor that you could think of perhaps is CVS. So CVS and Aetna combine. Aetna is a health insurer, right?

And so CVS pharmacies, they depend a lot on health insurers for how much they get paid and all that reimbursement. And so by hooking up with an insurer, it just gives it that much more leverage, both internally and externally, on the payments that it receives for dispensing prescriptions. That deal allayed the reimbursement pressure for CVS. And Walgreens tried to do something similar and get a deal with the insurance company Humana. But the deal fell through, and the number of potential partners was thinning out. Express Scripts, that big PBM with which Walgreens had this pretty nasty dispute back in the 2011 timeframe, they hooked up with Cigna.

They merged with Cigna, which is another large health insurer. So they got bigger and bigger. And again, they're hooked up with the insurers that have so much power in this equation. And Walgreens was left, you know, sort of standing alone at the dance. A wallflower at the big PBM health insurance dance. And those are some like real exciting dances, let me tell you.

Pasina stepped down as CEO in 2021, but stayed on as executive chairman. Walgreens hired two other CEOs in the past four years, but neither of them were able to turn the company around. And investors lost patience. Its stock has just been decimated. And there's just really, you know, very little faith that the company can turn it around. Because all of its other diversification strategies, again, just didn't solve its cash flow problems,

didn't solve its declining margins. Last week, the private equity firm Sycamore announced it would buy Walgreens for $10 billion, a fraction of the $100 billion it was once valued at. Pacino will stay on as a shareholder. Sycamore plans to take the pharmacy chain off the stock market. In a statement, Walgreens' CEO said this will allow the company time to focus more long-term in its decision-making. The deal is expected to close in about six months.

What did Pasina get wrong about running pharmacies in America? I think that Pasina looked at the US healthcare system as a European and he said, this is crazy. These people spend so much money on healthcare. It's not even like their health outcomes are any better than us in Europe who spend way less. In fact, their health outcomes are worse.

But you can't just keep spending 15, 20% of your GDP on healthcare and it's just gonna keep rising like that forever. This is unsustainable. There's gonna be a focus on efficiency and payment reform in a way that's going to change things and make it more European like So it turns out that the rising health care costs in the US aren't unsustainable that Americans will continue to pay more and more out of pocket and that there hasn't been this big reckoning of

The government or health insurers really cracking down on the way we pay for health care Which you know easier said than done. And the system hasn't quite made that turn yet, if ever. So is Walgreens gonna fall into the bucket of K-Marts and Borders books and other failed chains? Well, certainly not right away. You know, it still has a huge presence in the United States. So I don't think we'll see them disappear, at certainly not right away. It still has a huge presence in the United States. So I don't think we'll see them disappear, at least not right away.

I think a lot depends on what Sycamore and its new owners do to help it turn around. When Sycamore completes the deal, it will have to decide how much more it can downsize and how much more efficiencies it can get out of this company and whether it can do what the previous management at Walgreens couldn't. -♪ Before we go, we wanted to tell you that we're thinking about hosting a live journal event.

Tell us what you want to see by taking our survey. There's a link in our show notes. And for updates on our plans, a live journal event. Tell us what you want to see by taking our survey. There's a link in our show notes. And for updates on our plans, please leave us your email address. That's all for today, Monday, March 10th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Sharon Turlip. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.