"The trends for Walgreens aren’t good - it has closed a thousand stores since 2018, and plans to shut 1,200 more this year. And if you look at the gross operating income of the U.S. retail segment, it is collapsing.
I put these charts together based on data in Walgreen’s annual reports.
What’s going on? Well that’s simple. Margins are falling apart.
Galloway and Elson went back and forth on why Walgreens is flailing. The company hasn’t modernized in the age of Amazon. It has too many stores. Bad management. A dumb acquisition of VillageMD in 2021. Etc. And these would seem like reasonable causes, since lots of other retailers are dying in the face of low price competition.
But the real reason Walgreens, and the pharmacy business in general, is dying, is because of a failure to enforce antitrust laws against unfair business methods and illegal mergers. Elson touched on it when he mentioned lower reimbursement rates, but I don’t think people appreciate the full scope of what happened to Walgreens, and to the full pharmacy business in general. This is not a case of bad management, it’s a case of desperate management."
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-real-reason-walgreens-collapsed
#USA #Walgreens #Monopolies #Oligopolies #Pharmacy #Antitrust
