This Fish Stinks
“A fish rots from the head” goes the old proverb.
Walgreens has been in the news lately for its desperate cost cutting moves. They’ve closed hundreds of stores, and have been laying off personnel. Theirs is a business model that dosen’t fit the 21st Century economy: a stand-alone pharmacy with a convenience store attached. Most of their sales are from the low-margin pharmacy, and they simply can’t get the retail sales up. Face it, nobody shops at Walgreens.
But that’s not the only problem. The company has been suffering as the result of a continuous string of bone-headed exectutive decisions.
Like building 8,000 stores in the US. In most of the Chicago metro area, you can literally walk from Walgreens to Walgreens. Or like trying to market high-end cosmetics and beauty products — in Walgreens? Really? Or even more absurd, the half-dozen or so richly appointed “flaghip” stores where folks could buy $3,700 Louis XIII cognac, freshly made sushi and $20 cigars. Walgreens as an up-market shopping destination. That sounds like a joke. When I worked at the corporate office as a harried cubicle drone, my colleagues and I watched this all unfold and marvelled at the shear stupidity of it. But hey, what could we possibly know, we weren’t senior executives.
As if the dumbass marketing wasn’t bad enough, there’s the #Theranos scandal. Walgreens bought into the idea that a single drop of blood from a finger prick could be used to run a battery of tests. At the time they were promoting the technology, that sounded ridiculous to me with my high school level biology background. So I did some quick online research, and yeah, medical expects agreed, it was frickin’ ridiculous. The buffoonery of Walgreens’ chief executives had taken a dark turn: besides harming the company, as usual, now it was endangering public saftey with false diagnoses based on Theranos testing. Ultimately it cost Walgreens $44 million in a class action lawsuit, and we can only guess how much in lost sales afterward.
And just this year, Walgreens agreed to pay $106 million to settle lawsuits that alleged it submitted false payment claims with government health care programs for prescriptions that were never dispensed. The company said the false claims were the result of a software glitch. So this wasn’t thievery, it was honest incompitence. So much for slogan “The Pharmacy America Trusts”.
The aspect of Walgreens mismangement that concerned me directly was internal. Beginning in 2009, they adopted what I call a snake pit ethos. Cuts had to be made, and working people’s jobs were suddenly at stake, so management fostered an atmosphere of chaos, hostility and extreme competiveness, pitting employees against each other. They hired a new head of the advertising department, in which I worked, whose sole purpose seemed to be to degrade and humiliate the employees en masse, and to crush indidvidual creativity. Anybody who didn’t fit the mold was set up to fail and eliminated. The unimaginitively loyal and the unscrupulous thrived. The submissive survived. Not the way to run a company, in my opinion, but hey, what could I possibly know, I’m not a senior executive.
I was let go in 2017, after a little over fifteen years. Six of those years constituted the darkest chapter of my life. When I left, I was overweight, drinking heavily, chronically depressed and anxious, and my general health was poor. Today, I’m fit, sober and well.
Recently, the company completely eliminated the in-house advertising department. That’s a difficult setback for a lot of people, but take it from me, friends: Nobody ever left Walgreens’ employment who isn’t better for having left.
