Walgreen

Darby Ziegler stopped by her local Walgreens drugstore in Huntington Beach the other day to refill a prescription. She got her meds — and some surprising news. Beginning Jan. 1, Walgreens will no longer fill prescriptions for Anthem Blue Cross members, meaning that they'll have to switch to another drugstore if they want their insurance to keep covering their meds. "My husband and I have been going to this Walgreens for 10 or 12 years," said Ziegler, 43. "They don't even have to look us up on the computer.

Darby Ziegler stopped by her local Walgreens drugstore in Huntington Beach the other day to refill a prescription. She got her meds — and some surprising news. Beginning Jan. 1, Walgreens will no longer fill prescriptions for Anthem Blue Cross members, meaning that they'll have to switch to another drugstore if they want their insurance to keep covering their meds. "My husband and I have been going to this Walgreens for 10 or 12 years," said Ziegler, 43. "They don't even have to look us up on the computer.

Question: I am a longtime holder of Walgreen Co. stock and would like to know where the company is headed. Answer: The largest U.S. drugstore chain by number of locations faces a future of intense competition from discount retailers, mail-order pharmacies and rival drugstore operators. Nonetheless, Walgreen maintains strong brand recognition, with 8,065 Walgreens stores in the U.S., some with in-store health clinics. The company also operates a network of work-site health centers.

Question: I have been encouraged and then discouraged by my shares of Rite Aid Corp. What does the future hold? Answer: It's not easy being No. 3. The nation's third-largest retail drugstore chain has less productive stores and carries more debt than industry leaders Walgreen Co. and CVS Caremark Corp. Supermarket chains, discount stores and mail-order pharmacies are also providing fierce competition. The company is trying out several new store formats and increasing promotional activity to try to lure consumers worried about unemployment and high fuel costs.

Walgreen Co. has agreed to pay $35 million to settle a whistle-blower suit alleging that it boosted the price for prescriptions paid by Medicaid by switching from capsules to tablets, or vice versa, depending on which was more expensive. Federal officials said the practice of switching dramatically increased the amount of taxpayer money that Walgreen, which operates drugstores in 48 states and Puerto Rico, charged to the Medicaid program. The federal government, 42 states and Puerto Rico will share the $35 million, officials said.

Longs Drug Stores Corp. repeated its refusal to enter buyout talks with Walgreen Co. or to share information with its larger rival. Longs said Walgreen "has not presented a clear road map to completion" of a deal, and was not willing to assume any risk that the deal could be rejected or delayed by antitrust regulators. Walgreen has offered to buy Longs for $75 a share, or $2.8 billion. But Longs has accepted CVS Caremark Corp.'s lower bid of $71.50 a share, or $2.7 billion. Longs' shares rose $1.58, or 2.1%, to $76.09, indicating that investors believe the company is worth even more than Walgreen has bid for it. Longs said the CVS bid -- which has already been approved by regulators -- was more likely to be completed.

Walgreen Co., the largest U.S. drugstore chain, agreed to acquire McKesson Corp.'s specialty pharmacy unit. Terms of the purchase weren't disclosed.

Walgreen Co. has removed Encaprin, a nonprescription painkiller, from its shelves nationwide following an anonymous warning the drug was laced with cyanide, a company spokesman said today. There were no reports of actual tampering, the spokesman said. Also, the caller named an Encaprin lot number that does not exist and said the capsules had been tainted in Detroit area Walgreen stores, where the drugstore chain does not operate, company officials said.

Walgreen Co., the second-largest U.S. drugstore chain, said it would eliminate 1,000 positions, or about 9% of those employed in corporate and field management.

Drugstore chain Walgreen Co. said Monday that its fiscal third-quarter profit rose 2% as it focused on cost control and maintained a rapid expansion pace in a difficult retail environment. Despite the modest gain, the results were slightly short of Wall Street expectations and Walgreen shares fell back after initially climbing nearly 3%. Overall, however, analysts said the Deerfield, Ill.-based company's cost discipline and continued advances in a weak economy showed it had turned a corner after recent sluggishness.

A huge Internet security breach that exposed countless names and email addresses also focused attention on an increasingly popular target for hackers: data firms that store customers' personal information for banks, retailers and other companies. Customers of as many as 50 firms, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Kroger Co., TiVo Inc., Best Buy Co., Walgreen Co. and Capital One Financial Corp., found out over the weekend that their email addresses were exposed to hackers who had broken into the system of Epsilon Data Management, a Dallas company that provides online mail services to 2,500 companies.

Walgreen Co. is buying Drugstore.com Inc. for $429 million as the drugstore chain seeks a bigger foothold in the fast-growing business of online retail. The acquisition of the Bellevue, Wash., online retailer will give Walgreen of Deerfield., Ill., an additional $450 million in annual revenue and access to more than 3 million online customers. The deal will also add about 60,000 products to Walgreen's online offerings, the drugstore giant said in announcing the deal Thursday. Walgreen has annual sales of more than $65 billion.

Customer information collected by three companies, including McDonald's Corp. and Walgreen Co., has been compromised in recent days. The incidents highlight the vulnerability of that information, especially when consumers, overwhelmed with the number of online log-ins they need, use "dumb" passwords for their accounts, experts say. Recent breaches contained such information as names and e-mail addresses. They did not involve crucial personal information, such as Social Security, bank account and credit card numbers, the companies said.

Not so long ago, perusing Lanvin at H&M, Zac Posen and Jean Paul Gaultier at Target and C. Ronson at JCPenney would have seemed like the first indicator of a fashion apocalypse, the stuff of Anna Wintour's nightmares. Yet since H&M's 2004 Karl Lagerfeld limited-edition capsule collection launched and sold out within an hour at several locations, a big-name designer's survival is practically contingent on one such street cred collaboration or lower-priced diffusion line. Presumably, mass-market stores such as Kmart, Kohl's and the rest need the designers just as much.

Question: I am a longtime holder of Walgreen Co. stock and would like to know where the company is headed. Answer: The largest U.S. drugstore chain by number of locations faces a future of intense competition from discount retailers, mail-order pharmacies and rival drugstore operators. Nonetheless, Walgreen maintains strong brand recognition, with 8,065 Walgreens stores in the U.S., some with in-store health clinics. The company also operates a network of work-site health centers.

It turns out Walgreen Co. and CVS Caremark Corp. need each other after all. After months of contract negotiations, punctuated by a two-week public brawl, the two drugstore giants announced Friday that they had settled a dispute that threatened to prevent thousands of people from filling their prescriptions at Walgreens stores. At issue: the way Caremark, one of the nation's biggest prescription-plan operators, prices discounts for prescriptions filled at Walgreens pharmacies, which often compete fiercely with nearby CVS stores nationwide.

Customer information collected by three companies, including McDonald's Corp. and Walgreen Co., has been compromised in recent days. The incidents highlight the vulnerability of that information, especially when consumers, overwhelmed with the number of online log-ins they need, use "dumb" passwords for their accounts, experts say. Recent breaches contained such information as names and e-mail addresses. They did not involve crucial personal information, such as Social Security, bank account and credit card numbers, the companies said.

Question: I have been encouraged and then discouraged by my shares of Rite Aid Corp. What does the future hold? Answer: It's not easy being No. 3. The nation's third-largest retail drugstore chain has less productive stores and carries more debt than industry leaders Walgreen Co. and CVS Caremark Corp. Supermarket chains, discount stores and mail-order pharmacies are also providing fierce competition. The company is trying out several new store formats and increasing promotional activity to try to lure consumers worried about unemployment and high fuel costs.

MANUFACTURING P&G to start 'eStore' and collect data The maker of Tide detergent, Pampers diapers and Gillette shavers is taking hundreds of its popular consumer products directly to shoppers through a new website. The "eStore," which Procter & Gamble Co. will launch this spring, is an unusual venture for a consumer products manufacturer because the website could put it in competition with some of its biggest customers: traditional and online retailers. But the site's leaders say it is a consumer research lab, and retailers will benefit from findings on how shoppers respond online and in stores to digital ads, coupons, store promotions and other factors.

Walgreen Co. plans to add beer and wine to its stores, marking a return to a business it exited more than a decade ago. The country's largest drugstore chain expects to roll out the category to Walgreens stores nationwide in the next 12 to 18 months as part of a broader attempt to drive traffic and boost sales. The return to carrying alcohol comes as the chain looks for ways to restore profit growth, including making over stores, cutting costs and expanding its healthcare businesses.