CVS Pharmacy has grown to be an almost unavoidable presence in American life throughout the last three decades. According to CVS, the vast majority of Americans live within driving distance of a CVS store. However, all of that will change because CVS announced that it will be shutting down about 900 inefficient shops in order to improve their bottom line and focus on stores that provide customers with the most value possible across the country.
Over the course of three years, CVS plans to close 900 brick-and-mortar locations. Instead of focusing on being a neighborhood convenience store, CVS wants to devote more resources to providing healthcare for customers. That’s why they’ll be advertising their HealthHUBs and Minute Clinic sites to consumers who are seeking for inexpensive alternatives to expensive healthcare visits, such as going to the emergency room or seeing a doctor’s office.
CVS announced that it will be closing 900 stores as a result of its effort to concentrate on healthcare and the increasing demand for digital experiences. The firm will shut about 10% of its 10,000 locations overall. CVS intends to shutter 300 outlets each year until they reach the 900 threshold. Beginning in spring 2022, the first three hundred shops will be closed.
The firm is searching for potential employees to hire at other Shopify locations or elsewhere in the corporation. The company does not want to push its hard-working staff out on the street and instead wishes to move them to a new position with the national organization.
Despite the fact that CVS is investing more of its resources into client needs in the next several years, the company’s CEO, Karen Lynch, stated that retail pharmacies would continue to play an essential role in CVS’s operations.
“Our retail stores are fundamental to our strategy and who we are as a company,” stated Lynch in a press release. “We remain focused on the competitive advantage provided by our presence in thousands of communities across the country, which complements our rapidly expanding digital presence.”
The announcement that CVS will be closing stores comes as no surprise to industry authorities such as Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData. Even to the point of calling the store’s closing a problem that CVS manufactured for itself since it had announced it has “neglected stores for far too long and has pushed some of them into the downward spiral of irrelevance.”
He continued, “The retail side of CVS’s business is shabby. Too many stores are stuck in the past with bad lighting, depressing interiors, messy merchandising, and a weak assortment of products. They are not destinations or places where people go out of anything other than necessity.”
CVS is losing customers to Target, Sephora, and other businesses because of the low quality of some of its stores. Saunders said that if CVS wants to reclaim its clients, it must act fast.
“Their future relies on proper investments being made in both retail and healthcare services,” he said. “And it is no good simply investing in health services if the environment in which they are presented is poor: consumers have a choice and will simply take their business elsewhere.”
