CVS announced today that they will cease selling cigarettes and other tobacco products. The idea being that they are trying to re-shape themselves as a retail health-care provider rather than a convenience store where you can also get your prescriptions filled. Still, that decision comes at a heavy price:
The $2 billion in annual sales CVS said it is giving up accounted for about 1.6 percent of the company’s total revenue in 2012, the last year for which full-year statistics are available.
I wonder how much they’ll make up for the loss with the massive amount of free media this is getting and the goodwill this kind of thing generates. This is the fourth place I’ve heard about this already this morning.
This is great. Between this and their great minute clinics, I’m liking them more and more.
What I hate about CVS, and something that keeps me from going there more often, is how I can go buy four items and get a 7 foot receipt printed out.
They could probably save that 2 billion they are losing on smokes if they’d cut down on the receipt/coupons that print out
That applies to almost every major store nowadays though. I have no idea why they do it.
I’m guessing the companies featured on those coupons pay them for doing that? Can’t imagine any other reason really.
Amen. And the extravagant paper trail is just the tail end of their generally appalling point of sale routine. The simplest transaction at CVS is a byzantine rigmarole of barcode scans, keypad entries, and elaborate countermeasures to whichever of the ninety-eight possible errors crop up.
Most transactions aren’t simple, though. Since the average CVS shopper is about four hundred years old and keenly interested in bargains, the odds are fairly good that you’ll end up in the check-out line behind some uncomprehending blue-rinse wide load with a trolley full of markdowns and eight different coupons that will stack three different ways, but not all together. In the event of someone returning an item, it’s quicker just to pull the fire alarm and come back later.
But kudos to them on the new tobacco policy. It’s always seemed perverse for a pharmacy to sell both medication and things to make you sick.
This is a mistake and I bet they reverse it within 3 months. Lots of things are bad for you. Are they going to stop selling alcohol? Candy? Soft drinks? Chips?
They’d rather be in the medical delivery biz: CVS Quits Tobacco to Become a Medical Giant
I guess they figure why muddy the water when tobacco sales are in a steep decline anyway with no prospects of pulling out.
The CEO addressed this in an NPR interview. He said that while candy and chips are fine as an occasional treat, there’s no level of tobacco use that’s harmless.
Yes, beer and wine. Hard liquor is only sold in specialized stores that have to be closed on Sundays. God and all.
I still say they will double back. I don’t smoke (I do dip…but I don’t think they ever sold dip) and I am going to stop patronizing them.
Keep up that fight for the poor struggling tobacco industry brother!
They sell alcohol of all types in California.