Walgreens

Walgreens began in 1901, when Charles Rudolph Walgreen purchased a small food front store on the corner of Bowen and Cottage Grove Avenues in Chicago, where he had worked as a pharmacist. Walgreen manufactured his own line of drug products. By 1913, Walgreens had grown to four stores on Chicago's South Side. It opened its fifth in 1915 and four more in 1916. By 1919, there were 20 stores in the chain.

As a result of alcohol prohibition, the 1920s were a successful time for Walgreens: although alcohol was illegal, Walgreens sold prescription whiskey. This prescribed alcohol was sold at inflated price, compared to a speakeasy. In 1922, Walgreens introduced a malted milkshake, which led to its establishing ice cream manufacturing plants. A Walgreens employee named Ivar Coulson modified the basic malted milk recipe by adding scoops of vanilla ice cream. The milkshake was sold at $0.20 and Walgreens became the place to "hang out". The next year, Walgreens began opening stores away from residential areas. In the mid-1920s, there were 44 stores with annual sales of $1.2 million combined. Walgreens had also expanded by then into Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin. By 1930, it had 397 stores with annual sales of $4 million. This expansion partly was attributed to selling the prescribed alcohol that Walgreen often stocked under the counter, as accounted in Daniel Okrent's Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.

Although milkshakes and malted milk had been around for some time before, Walgreens has claimed credit for the popularization of the malted milkshake (or at least its version of it, invented by Ivar "Pop" Coulson in 1922).

The stock market crash in October 1929 and subsequent Great Depression did not greatly affect the company. By 1934, Walgreens was operating 601 stores in 30 states. After Walgreen died in 1939, his son Charles R. Walgreen Jr. took over the chain until his retirement.

In 1946, Walgreens purchased Sanborns, one of Mexico's largest pharmacy and department store chains, from Frank Sanborn (Walgreens sold Sanborns to Grupo Carso in 1982).

Charles "Cork" R. Walgreen III took over after Walgreen Jr.'s retirement in the early 1950s and modernized the company by switching to barcode scanning. The company also created larger-sized Walgreens Superstores and purchased the Globe Discount City chain of big-box stores from United Mercantile, Inc. in the 1960s. The Walgreen family was not involved in senior management of the company for a short time after Walgreen III retired. In the 1980s Walgreens owned and operated a chain of casual family restaurants/pancake houses called Wag's. Walgreens sold most of these to Marriott Corp. in 1988, and by 1991 the chain was out of business. In 1986, Walgreens acquired the MediMart chain from Stop & Shop. Kevin P. Walgreen was made a vice-president in 1995 and promoted to senior vice president of store operations in 2006.

21st century

On July 12, 2006, David Bernauer stepped down as CEO of Walgreens and was replaced by company president Jeff Rein, who was later named chief executive officer and chairman of the board. That year, Walgreens acquired the Happy Harry's chain in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey. In 2007, Walgreens acquired Hal Rosenbluth's Take Care Health Systems, a chain of quick-care clinics, for an undisclosed amount. On October 10, 2008, Rein was replaced by Alan G. McNally as chairman and acting CEO. On January 26, 2009, Gregory Wasson was named CEO effective February 1, 2009.

In 2010, Walgreens acquired New York City-area chain Duane Reade for $1.075 billion, including debt, and continued to use the Duane Reade name on some stores in the New York City metropolitan area. In March 2011, Walgreens acquired Drugstore.com for $409 million. On June 19, 2012, Walgreens paid $6.7 billion for a 45% interest in Alliance Boots. That year, Walgreens acquired Mid-South drugstore chain operating under the USA Drug, Super D Drug, May's Drug, Med-X, and Drug Warehouse banners. In November 2010, Walgreens filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against the Wegmans supermarket chain, claiming the "W" in the Wegman's logo was too similar to Walgreens'. The suit was settled in April 2011, with Wegmans agreeing to discontinue use of its "W" logo by June 2012, although the supermarket retained the right to use the "Wegmans" name in script. Since 2010, Walgreens has had a technology office in Chicago, serving as its digital hub.

Under its 2009 business model, Walgreens stores were generally freestanding corner stores, with the entrance on the street with the most traffic flow, figuratively making it a "corner drugstore" similar to how many independent pharmacies evolved. Many stores have a drive-through pharmacy. Most freestanding stores have a similar look and layout, including a bigger and more spacious layout than certain stores in major cities. Newer buildings have a more modern design than older stores. Some stores in major cities, such as New York and Chicago, have multiple floors, most notably their flagship stores. Behind the front registers are tobacco products and alcoholic beverages. Some stores do not sell these products, e.g., New Jersey stores that do not sell alcohol and Massachusetts stores that do not sell tobacco.

Lawsuits and criticism against Walgreens

Federal billing fraud and price negotiation

In 2009, Walgreens threatened to leave the Medicaid program, the state and federal partnership to provide health insurance coverage to the poor, in Delaware over reimbursement rates. Walgreens was the largest pharmacy chain in the state and the only chain to make such a threat. The state of Delaware and Walgreens reached an agreement on payment rates and the crisis was averted.

In 2010, Walgreens stopped accepting Medicaid in Washington state, leaving its one million Medicaid recipients unable to use Medicaid to pay for their prescriptions filled at these 121 stores.

Distribution of opioids

In September 2012, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) accused Walgreens of endangering public safety and barred the company from shipping oxycodone and other controlled drugs from its Jupiter, Florida, distribution center. The DEA said that Walgreens failed to maintain proper controls to ensure that it did not dispense drugs to addicts and drug dealers. The DEA also said that six of Walgreens' Florida pharmacies ordered in excess of one million oxycodone pills a year. In contrast, in 2011 the average pharmacy in the U.S. ordered 73,000 oxycodone tablets a year according to the DEA. One Walgreens pharmacy in Fort Myers, Florida, ordered 95,800 pills in 2009, but by 2011, this number had jumped to 2.2 million pills in one year. Another example was a Walgreens pharmacy in Hudson, Florida, a town of 34,000 people near Clearwater, that purchased 2.2 million pills in 2011, the DEA said. Immediate suspension orders are an action taken when the DEA believes a registrant, such as a pharmacy or a doctor, is "an imminent danger to the public safety." All DEA licensees "have an obligation to ensure that medications are getting into the hands of legitimate patients," said Mark Trouville, former DEA special agent in charge of the Miami Field Division. "When they choose to look the other way, patients suffer and drug dealers prosper."

The Jupiter, Florida, distribution center, which opened in 2001, is one of 12 such distribution centers owned by Walgreens. Since 2009, Walgreens' Jupiter facility has been Florida's largest distributor of oxycodone, the DEA said. Over the past three years, its market share has increased, and 52 Walgreens are among the top 100 oxycodone purchasers in the state, the DEA said.

In 2013, United States Attorney Wifredo Ferrer said Walgreens committed "an unprecedented number" of recordkeeping and dispensing violations. Walgreens was fined $80 million, the largest fine in the history of the Controlled Substances Act at that time.

In November 2021, a federal jury found that Walgreens, along with CVS and Walmart, "had substantially contributed to" the opioid crisis. The trial lasted six weeks with the jury returning a verdict finding the pharmacies liable. It was the first trial where pharmacy companies defended themselves amid the opioid epidemic.