Retail Watchers

Latest update on the purchase of nearly 2200 Rite Aid stores by Walgreens. They refiled today with the FTC in hopes of not having a lengthy review process.
https://www.thestreet.com/story/1427583 ... tores.html

I'm not clear if Walgreens re-filed...

Based on how Walgreens Stores look, they seem to be like a company that is going down. Cutting inventory, cutting labor, not maintaining their parking lots or landscaping unless they have to (like when they are paying into a common area maintenance association)... cannot believe how bad the parking lots and landscaping look at all of their stores in Reno along Virginia Street (there are 3 of them, all freestanding). They should be embarrassed.

Los Angeles Times: Deal is done
Walgreens and Rite Aid say FTC has appr ... story.html

SamSpade wrote:Los Angeles Times: Deal is done
Walgreens and Rite Aid say FTC has appr ... story.html

But with even fewer stores spun off, 1932. Slightly over 250 more stores will be retained vs. the announced 2nd deal.
http://couponsinthenews.com/2017/09/19/ ... id-stores/

This will be interesting to see how this shakes out in a year or two.

This revised deal is interesting. It pretty much cleaned up the states where Rite Aid was retaining 5 stores or fewer and got them completely out of those states.

I continue to believe Rite Aid dumped many hundreds of low performing stores to Walgreens. Those Rite Aids in the South and in the Carolinas did absolutely terrible business. Eckerd was a poor purchase and the stores have unbelievably low traffic.

This revised deal also gets rid of a number of additional states completely, while bulking up some higher density states.

For instance, the original deal had Rite Aid retaining:

LA: 4 stores
MS: 1 store
AL: 1 store
GA: 2 stores
TN: 4 stores
KY: 2 stores
WV: 2 stores
ME: 1 store
RI: 1 store
Now all of those are gone and sold. This makes sense as operating 18 stores across a fairly large geography like that just does not really make much sense.

It appears the new deal had the following "keep more stores" results:
Idaho: Rite Aid keeping 5 more stores
Colorado: Rite Aid losing 1 more store, so only keeping 3 stores there (hard to see how this is worth supporting)
New York: keeping 180 more stores
New Jersey: keeping 33 more stores
Maryland: keeping 30 more stores
CT: keeping 12 more stores

I guess we will see how this goes...

storewanderer wrote:This revised deal is interesting. It pretty much cleaned up the states where Rite Aid was retaining 5 stores or fewer and got them completely out of those states.

I continue to believe Rite Aid dumped many hundreds of low performing stores to Walgreens. Those Rite Aids in the South and in the Carolinas did absolutely terrible business. Eckerd was a poor purchase and the stores have unbelievably low traffic.

Exactly. Most of the stores in the states they are leaving, especially in the South, were all acquired stores with very low reputations.

storewanderer wrote:This revised deal also gets rid of a number of additional states completely, while bulking up some higher density states.

For instance, the original deal had Rite Aid retaining:

LA: 4 stores
MS: 1 store
AL: 1 store
GA: 2 stores
TN: 4 stores
KY: 2 stores
WV: 2 stores
ME: 1 store
RI: 1 store
Now all of those are gone and sold. This makes sense as operating 18 stores across a fairly large geography like that just does not really make much sense.

For the first 5 states on this list, they really won't be missed very much. LA/MS/TN were probably all K&B stores with a few new build Rite Aid stores scattered in for bad measure.

storewanderer wrote:It appears the new deal had the following "keep more stores" results:
Idaho: Rite Aid keeping 5 more stores
Colorado: Rite Aid losing 1 more store, so only keeping 3 stores there (hard to see how this is worth supporting)
New York: keeping 180 more stores
New Jersey: keeping 33 more stores
Maryland: keeping 30 more stores
CT: keeping 12 more stores

I guess we will see how this goes...

I predict certain failure within 5 years. Too small to compete against the two bigger players. At least Fred's got out with a chunk of change.

Today Walgreens announced they will be closing 600 stores in conjunction with the purchase of Rite Aid Stores. They say most closures will be of Rite Aid Stores.

storewanderer wrote: ↑October 25th, 2017, 11:05 am Today Walgreens announced they will be closing 600 stores in conjunction with the purchase of Rite Aid Stores. They say most closures will be of Rite Aid Stores.

My guess is that most of these stores are in areas where Rite-Aid sold duplicate stores to Walgreens which Walgreens would have no point in continuing operations on, yet they would be too far of a reach geographically for Rite-Aid to hold onto them. The poster child of this is a Rite Aid in Peachtree City, GA (located here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rite+ ... 1758?hl=en) which is located directly adjacent to a Walgreens (the parking lots are even shared).

I know of at least eight Rite Aid stores in South Carolina within a mile of a Walgreen's store in Boiling Springs, Clemson, Greenville, Spartanburg (4), Travelers Rest. It remains to be seen if they are indeed being acquired by Walgreen's.