Write A Term Paper On Walgreens

Founded in 1901 as a neighborhood drugstore, Walgreens now has 8,175 stores in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands. Recently in 2014 Walgreens took their operations global with the acquisition of 45% share in Alliance Boots, a European health and beauty group. On average Walgreens fulfills 800 million prescriptions per day, serves 6 million customers per day and has 17 million visitors per month to their website (Strong, n.d.).
Walgreens original business approach to gain market share was to open new stores, splitting the space between retail and pharmacy/health care services. This strategy met with marginal success but profits soon began to fall off. In 2005 Walgreens decided to expand into new U.S.

More recently Walgreens plan to innovate and reinvent Walgreens was outlined by CEO Gregory Wasson at their 2014 Annual Shareholders Meeting. Named “plan to win” Walgreens, has decided to reposition itself as a health care company through convenience, pharmacy modernization and increased focus on customer care. The company has slowed the growth of new stores and instead they have remodeled their pharmacies, devoted more space to health care and introduced several new innovated features to include Walgreens Take Care Clinics (WTCC), a multipurpose room and a room for community-based health events (CBHE) in their stores. The WTCC allows customers to walk in and receive professional health care, the multipurpose room is where patients receive health screenings and immunizations and the CBHE room is where wellness events and biometric health fairs are held (EY, 2012). Dubbed the “Well Experience”, Walgreens has an increased focus on and invested in training so that employees are, “highly engaged in delivering extraordinary customer care with the right products and solutions in every community in America” (Walgreens, 2014). Under the Well Experience initiative, Walgreens introduced the Balance Rewards loyalty program, it has over 74 million active members, making it the most successful loyalty program launch in