Video 1: The Walgreen Creed
*Background Music Begins*
Female Narrator: The Walgreens legacy began with one person and one store. Pharmacist Charles R. Walgreen was an entrepreneur with the drive and desire to succeed. He also believed in a principled approach to business. He immortalized those principles in something he called the Walgreens Creed. It says in part that, “We believe that honest goods can be sold to honest people by honest methods.” The Walgreen Creed extols the virtues of courtesy, kindness, and honest competition. Although much has changed in the past century, those values still guide Walgreens today. Our founder also believed in the people that worked in his stores. He depended on them to personify his values in the service they provided to patients and customers. People liked the Walgreens way of doing business, and soon one store became a dozen, then a hundred, a thousand, and more. Today, selection, convenience, quality, and most of all service keep people coming back to their neighborhood Walgreens store. Our success is no accident. Walgreens has many innovative services that make it easier to refill prescriptions, easier to pay for them, even easier to pick them up. Right now, we can give patients their prescription instructions in over 14 different languages. They can print a copy of their family's prescriptions records by visiting our website from the comfort of their home. Over the years, Walgreens has also been an innovator, pioneering retail concepts such as self-service shopping and point of sale scanning. Walgreens has also developed new technologies, such as our industry-leading Intercom Plus pharmacy management system. Walgreens continues to give its people the best tools in the industry to help them lead and succeed. Today, Walgreens leads the chain drug store industry in sales, profits, stores, and new store growth, but the secret to our success is in the principles established by our founder and continued by his successors.
*Background Music Ends*
Male Narrator: Young Charles Walgreen was drawn to the bright lights of Chicago from Dixon, Illinois in 1893 and became a registered pharmacist in 1897. He bought his first drugstore in 1901 and another with partner Arthur Thorsen eight years later. Soon, Charles was making his own ice cream, and his wife Myrtle was preparing lunches for the increasingly popular fountain business. In 1916, nine stores incorporated as the Walgreen Company, and by the end of the second decade, there were 19 drug stores in the chain.
Walgreens entered Chicago's loop in 1921, reached St. Louis a few years later, and by 1927 was on Broadway in New York City. By that time, a new Walgreens store was opening each week. In 1927, the Walgreen Company had its first public stock offering. And by 1933, the company paid its first in the still-unbroken string of dividends. 1939 marked the end not only of the decade, but of an era. Charles Walgreen Senior died in December that year, and Charles Walgreen Junior became president of the company.
Walgreens sold $41 million in war bonds during World War II and operated a non-profit drugstore in the Pentagon. After the war, Walgreens continued its rapid expansion, including the acquisition of a controlling interest in Sanborn's, a Mexican chain of drugstores. By 1953, Walgreens made a major shift in strategy as it became the largest self-service drugstore chain in the country. In 1960, Walgreens entered the Puerto Rico market.
As Walgreens continued to expand, the company built Supercenters, bought discount department stores, experimented with the food and drug combo concept, and opened full service restaurants. Meanwhile, soda fountains were phased out. Walgreens was the largest drug chain in the country in sales. But the 1970's brought rough weather as soaring inflation outdated stores and peripheral businesses sapped the company's strength. By the end of the decade, however, it was back to basics – drugstores, and another record breaking year.
Walgreens became the first drugstore chain to top $2 billion in sales in fiscal 1981. Computerization revolutionized the way Walgreens operated. In 1984, the company opened its one-thousandth store. By 1990, Walgreens pioneered freestanding drugstores on high-traffic corners. Drive-through pharmacy service, 24-hour stores, Internet ordering, and 1-hour photo finishing are hallmarks of the company's determination to be the country's most convenient healthcare provider. In 1991, Walgreens Health Services was born with the incorporation of Walgreens Healthcare Plus. The company's three-thousandth store opened in the year 2000, with the goal of operating 7000 stores by the year 2010.
Video 2: This place changes everything.
The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity.
The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty. – Winston Churchill
*Hopeful Background Music*
Manager: It has nothing to do with people with disabilities or no disabilities. You've just got to treat everybody the way you would like to be treated.
Team Member: They have to treat you right. They treat me right out here.
Team Member: It's just different here. Everybody is real nice. Cool about it. And they understand…
Team Member: I heard about this job, and I figured, “Hmm, it could be something I want to do.”
Team Member: I feel at home a little bit more here than I have other places.
Senior Vice President: This isn't about charity. We didn't lower any of our performance standards. Every team member is expected to perform at the same high level. Same pay, same performance, side-by-side.
Team Member: And I said, “Mom and Dad, I want to work at Walgreens.” This is what I wanted. That's where my heart was, and since I came over here I have fallen in love with this place. I wouldn't trade this place for anything.
Job Coach: I need to learn from this person. I need to take things from them. I may be the manager, but I'm learning here from my team members.
Team Member & Parent: He walks and he talks in just a more positive way. I just know that he's going to make it now.
Team Member: If you want to be a productive adult, then this is where it starts. You can make a life here at Walgreens. You can retire at Walgreens.
Team Member & Parent: Every parent with a child with a special need or autism – their hope is to outlive their child by one day, and I don't have that fear anymore. I don't have that feeling like I have to outlive him by one day anymore.
Team Member: And, of course, to give them this chance is just great for a lot of people, especially with special needs – to come out, strive, be their own person and not feel like they're held down by anything.
Team Member: You're around people with all kind of different things here. It's kind of like a melting pot. Everybody just comes together, and it doesn't matter what's wrong with you.
Team Member: He said, “It's my first check, and I took it home.” He said, “My mother looked at it and she started crying. Why do you think she did that?” I said, “I don't know.” But I knew. You know.
Team Member: I like this job because of the people I work with and the friends that I've made.
Team Member: Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursday, and Friday.
Parents: And I think he understands now the difference between the workweek and the then the weekend.
Team Member & Sister: You know, it's not a crime to be happy during the day. It's kind of nice.
Parent: Just the fact that he gets up every morning and he gets on that van without mom taking him and gets here and walks in the door, and he knows where he's supposed to go, and knows what his job is, he knows he's done it well, and he comes home and feels good about himself every day.
Senior Vice President: The surprising thing is that we started out wanting to change the workplace – and what we found out was that we were the ones who were changed.
Manager: And it's actually taught me more patience in my job responsibilities here. Working with all team members and learning my own patience, it's kind of re-taught me and made me rethink the way I approach things even as far as my own family and kids and so forth now.
Team Member: You know, if we don't help each other, then it's a sad world. And I think that's what Walgreens is about – we are all here to help each other.
Manager: They're doing things they never dreamed that they would be able to do. But you know what, they're also doing things that they never dreamed they would be given the opportunity to do. And that's the most impressive thing to me as an individual – what Walgreens is doing, extending that opportunity, and that's precious.
This place changes everything.
Video 3: Las Vegas Video
*Pleasant and soothing music*
Las Vegas, Nevada has been one of America's fasting growing cities in recent years. Here, you can catch a glimpse of the Walgreens strategy at work. As the market leader, our retail drug stores are conveniently located in neighborhoods throughout the city. As it does everywhere, the Walgreens brand here stands for Convenience, Value, and Superior Customer Service, whether for prescription drugs or everyday consumer necessities.
In the front of the store, that means getting back to basics with the right mix of product categories and brands, fewer SKUs, more effective promotion, and improved layouts and signage – all to make shopping at Walgreens more convenient and relevant than ever.
In our pharmacies, we are focused on improving efficiency and reducing cost. By applying state-of-the-art logistics and advanced technologies, we are beginning to centralize many prescription filling and clinical review functions. This will allow our pharmacists to spend more time counseling patients for everyday prescription needs, as well as for chronic medical conditions such as diabetes or hypertension. And, to offer high value billable services, such as therapy monitoring and management.
These changes will transform our business, and improve the customer and patient experience. But that's just the beginning. At our new in-store clinics, patients can simply walk in, without an appointment, to see a nurse practitioner, who can diagnose and treat many routine aliments from cuts and scrapes to ear aches and sore throats. Our clinics offer flu shots and other vaccinations, as well as back-to- school physicals and other types of wellness care.
We are also serving the needs of patients by providing access to new biotech and gene based drugs, which must be delivered in forms other than pills, and cannot be dispensed from an ordinary pharmacy. This fast growing segment of the healthcare market is called specialty pharmacy – and Walgreens is a market leader. These therapies treat conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, infertility, multiple sclerosis, cancer and hepatitis. Walgreens also offers services for patients who receive care at home, such as infusion and respiratory therapy.
We are also leveraging and enhancing the value of our core business through work site clinics. At this Las Vegas-based, employer-sponsored health and wellness center operated by Walgreens, 30,000 employees of Harrah's and their dependents benefit from a broad range of services. The facility includes a 12,000 square foot fitness center and a 7,000 square foot medical clinic. It has doctors, physician assistants, and other healthcare professionals on staff. Nutritional counseling is available to help people manage their weight, blood pressure, diabetes, and other conditions. Rehabilitation services, such as physical therapy, are another example of professional care that can be provided cost effectively in an employer-sponsored health and wellness setting.
Many of these extensions of our retail pharmacy business are still very new. But we are moving quickly to integrate them with our core business, to optimize their benefit to consumers, and to drive value for Walgreens. Our focus is to provide the most convenient access to consumer goods and services, pharmacy, and health and wellness services in America. We are strengthening and differentiating our brand, and extending our relationships with consumers, patients and payors beyond our 6,500 stores.
Our goal with every patient and customer is to exceed their expectations, so they will choose Walgreens whenever they need any of the products or services we offer across many channels, including our fast growing online business. In this way, consumers can continue to depend on Walgreens, a brand they have trusted for generations.
Walgreens, the pharmacy America trusts, is moving quickly to extend that trust to millions of new consumers, while leveraging and enhancing the strength and value of our core retail business. Every Walgreens customer for any Walgreens product or service is potentially a customer for every Walgreens product or service. That is our vision.