Walgreens aims to close about 200 stores in US

Associated Press

Walgreens will shutter about 200 U.S. stores as part of an expanded cost-reduction push, but the nation’s largest drugstore chain has no plans to shrink in the wake of its combination with European health and beauty retailer Alliance Boots.

The Deerfield, Ill., company expects to open roughly the same number of stores and will consider more mergers and acquisitions, even as it continues to digest a nearly $16 billion deal that finalized its combination with Alliance Boots, which runs the United Kingdom’s largest pharmacy chain.

The store closings that Walgreens announced Thursday amount to only about 2 percent of the 8,232 drugstores the company runs in the United States, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Nevertheless, the closings are the latest example of a strategy shift for a company that was opening about 500 stores a year a decade ago. Walgreens once estimated that it was opening a new store every 17 hours on average.