
Walgreens is in particularly awful shape
CNN
Drug stores around the United States are struggling. Especially Walgreens.
Drug stores around the United States are struggling. Especially Walgreens. Walgreens’ stock has plunged more than 80% over the past five years, ranking the company among the worst-performing stocks during that stretch. It’s closing 1,200 stores, roughly 15% of its locations. And now Walgreens is reportedly looking to escape the public market. Walgreens and private equity firm Sycamore Partners are discussing a deal to take Walgreens private, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The companies declined to comment to CNN on a potential deal. Walgreens’ problem, first and foremost, is that it’s more of a traditional pharmacy than CVS. Walgreens has slipped behind CVS because it’s smaller than CVS, giving it less scale to negotiate prices with insurers and other health care entities that pay for most of the prescriptions people pick up. Walgreens is also more reliant on filling prescriptions through its pharmacy business and selling snacks and household essentials than CVS, which has made a push into health care services. Both the pharmacy business and the retail business are struggling for different reasons. Profits from the pharmacy business have dropped in recent years as reimbursement rates for prescription drugs fall. The prices customers pay for drugs and the payments pharmacies receive are largely determined by companies known as pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, which negotiate rebates from drug manufacturers to insurers. PBMs have been cutting reimbursement rates to boost their own profits.

Travis Tanner says he first began using ChatGPT less than a year ago for support in his job as an auto mechanic and to communicate with Spanish-speaking coworkers. But these days, he and the artificial intelligence chatbot — which he now refers to as “Lumina” — have very different kinds of conversations, discussing religion, spirituality and the foundation of the universe.