Walgreens Announces Closure of 200 More Stores
It’s a tough time for brick and mortar stores all across the country and the latest to hit rocky waters is Walgreens.
Walgreens operates 10,000 stores all around the world and saw a 24 percent decrease in its quarterly net income, so the company is looking to free up $1.5 billion in the next few years and one of the ways they plan to do that is to close hundreds of stores.
On Tuesday, the company announced it will be closing 200 Walgreens stores across the United States. The upcoming closure of the stores follows an announcement from the company in May that it would also be closing 200 of their stores in the United Kingdom.
In a statement released to Business Insider, a spokesperson for Walgreens explained that the closure of the stores in the United States would affect less than three percent of its overall stores and that the company expects “minimal disruption to customers and patients.” However, you'll agree that the store closures will affect employees as massive layoffs will surely follow. What about all of the employees who found new jobs with Walgreens when Walgreens scooped up 1,651 Rite Aid stores in 2018?
What does this mean for Southern Tier and Central New York? Will we see some of our neighborhood stores close? Will some of our neighbors be on the hunt for new jobs? That’s something we’ll have to wait to find out as the Walgreens spokesperson says that the company does not intend to share the list of stores closing with the public at this time.
[via Business Insider/Forbes]