5 Prescriptions for $1 Billion in Cost Cuts at Walgreen
Here are five ways Walgreen executives are looking to reduce expenses over the next few years:
1. A reduction in jobs and related overhead is coming at headquarters in the northern Chicago suburb of Deerfield. “We are starting at the corporate level and working our way down to the supply chain, and we’re making best efforts to mitigate any impact it may have on delivering service to our customers,” CFO Timothy McLevish said on the company’s fiscal 2015 first-quarter earnings call last week.
2. Store relocations are potentially in the offering as executives ponder ways to boost operational performance. McLevish said Walgreen’s strategy in the past was to “have the best corner or location in any geography” to generate more traffic and higher sales. “In some cases that worked; in some cases it didn’t,” McLevish said.
3. Redesigns of stores and smaller formats and layouts are possible. “In some locations we would benefit by a smaller format store,” McLevish said. And Alex Gourlay, president of customer experience and daily living, said the company wants to make better use of stores by “having the right offer in that locality for the customers who are actually based around that store.”
4. Even though Walgreen decided against an “inversion” that would have relocated its headquarters from the northern Chicago suburbs to overseas, new leadership could still have the company looking outside the U.S. for a lower tax rate. It’s been reported that Pessina and Wasson clashed over the company’s decision against an inversion, which would have reduced Walgreen’s corporate taxes by several billion dollars. Walgreen’s tax rate of 37.5% in 2013 was almost twice what Switzerland-based Alliance Boots paid that year.
5. There will be store closures, and there could be changes to location leases. While Walgreen doesn’t expect large numbers of store closures, executives have stated that they are looking “to renegotiate leases,” McLevish said.
Filed under: General Problems
Good idea to start at the top cutting people. Lets be sure an cut out the morons that come up with all these metrics. While at it, lets cut the CEO’s salary and cut out any bonus or stock options too. Lets cut out all the idiots at the top that come up with all these corporate idiot ideas. Who knows, with all these kinds of cuts, they might turn out to be a decent chain.
Reduction in jobs= less pharmacy tech hrs, more pharmacists out of work, increased workload on those still employed, increased distractions and med errors at store levels due to poor work conditions…an increase of more of the same…..yeah WAGS, what a way to improve….NOT!!!!