Walgreens is continuing to close stores as part of its turnaround plans.
The thinning of Walgreens locations has been in the works. Walgreens said in October 2024 it planned to close about 1,200 underperforming stores across the U.S. as a strategy to offset declining profits resulting from low drug reimbursement rates and sluggish retail sales.
The strategy made sense, because about 25% of Walgreens stores were “not currently contributing to our long-term strategy,” Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. CEO Timothy Wentworth said in June 2024 during a call with investment analysts about the company’s quarterly financials.
Those 1,200 stores will be closed over three years, with about 500 to be closed in the company’s fiscal year 2025, which ends in August 2025, Walgreens said.
The company closed 70 stores in its first quarter of fiscal 2025, which ended Nov. 30, 2024, Wentworth said Friday in an analyst conference call. Walgreens plans to close about another 450 stores through the end of 2025, he said.
Walgreens, which has about 8,500 locations in the U.S. (and more than 3,600 Boots branded stores in the U.K. and elsewhere), has closed about 2,000 locations over the past decade, Wentworth said. “We expect to significantly ramp the pace of our store closures from the first quarter level,” he said.
“When you look at our stores, the stores that were not on the closure list, we see those stores being materially stronger, still not where they need to be, but materially stronger than the stores that we’re closing,” Wentworth said.
Investors appear bullish on the company’s progress in its $1 billion cost-cutting program. Shares of Walgreens Boots Alliance have risen 35% since the company reported its Q1 financials on Jan. 10.
Walgreens did not provide a list of stores where closings are planned in coming days. But reports of Walgreens stores set to close in February are cropping up.
