After saying it would close 1,200 stores across the country, a huge convenience store is now closing stores in the Bay Area.
The pharmacy chain Walgreens has revealed that three of its stores in the East Bay will close. This comes just two months after the company said it would close 1,200 stores across the country to make more money and cut costs.
We got this news from a company representative on Thursday.
One of the Walgreens stores that will be closed is the one at 3434 High Street in Oakland. It will close for good on January 22.
On top of that, two more shops, at 5809 Foothill Boulevard in Oakland and 1150 Macdonald Avenue in Richmond, are set to close on January 30.
To make sure that customers don’t have to go anywhere else for care, Walgreens will instantly move prescriptions from the stores on High Street and Foothill Boulevard to the Oakland store at 3232 Foothill Boulevard.
Prescriptions will be sent to the store at 13691 San Pablo Avenue in San Pablo for people who will be affected by the closing of the shop on Macdonald Avenue.
The spokesperson said in a statement that the retail pharmacy market is very important to Walgreens’ long-term strategy.
But they also said that the company is finding it harder to handle costs like rent, staffing, and materials because of rising regulatory challenges and reimbursement pressures.
Because of these closings, Oakland will still have six Walgreens shops, but Richmond will no longer have any.
The representative said, “Choosing to close a store is never easy.”
“We understand how important our stores are to the communities we serve, and we always try to make our stores run better.”
When bans are needed, like they were in the Bay Area, we work with people in the community to make sure that our customers are affected as little as possible.
A spokeswoman for the company said that employees at the affected stores will be able to move to nearby Walgreens stores. The spokesperson also said that the company is still evaluating its store footprint.
They promised that team members, patients, and customers who would be affected by any changes would be told about them ahead of time.
The spokesperson did not say, however, if the national plans to close stores would also affect other stores in the Bay Area.
The most recent store to close in San Francisco was the Walgreens at 275 Sacramento Street, which closed at the end of February.
No specific plans have been made yet for what will open in the shops that have closed.
But Casa Guadalupe, a local family-owned grocery store, has put in for planning permission to open a store at a former Walgreens on Chavez Street in the Mission District. The space has been empty for a while.
Walgreens CEO Tim Wentworth said that about a quarter of the company’s 8,600 stores across the country were not working well, which led to this strategic downsizing.
With over 580 stores, California has the second-highest number of Walgreens locations, after Florida. The recent store closings are a sign of a larger trend in the retail pharmacy business as companies adjust to changing consumer behavior and market conditions.
