Walgreens Buys Duane Reade Drug Stores – Gives Them A Big Footprint in New York

This purchase puts Walgreens in the New York market. The mergers and acquisitions in healthcare continue to roll. You can see the investor take in this article when you read this last paragraph as to how tight they are tied into their business intelligence algorithmic formulas and their numbers.

“the highest sales per square foot in the retail drugstore industry” - keep this in mind when you think about how calculated everything is in the world today. You can tell that Duane Reade was owned by an investment firm.

Am I supposed to be impressed with this? I don’t think so and in essence it is one more hint on the blinders that are worn on Wall Street about what is happening in their country. There’s a bit more in there, but this is enough to make me choke for now.

Nothing against Walgreens stores or the company as I shop there, it’s just the less than human values in half the stuff we see out there today in print that lacks taste which is a bit grinding. Companies boasting about their sales, figures and productions models today mean very little to the average person overall and on this blog too I try to stay away from posting about companies, hospitals, medical clinics, etc. talking about how good they are. We are consumers and we can figure out most of what is good and bad and don’t need more useless touts to convince us; but narcissism in print continues on.

Up until a few years ago where I am in southern California Walgreens didn’t have a huge showing, but now they are all over Orange County too and it’s either CVS or Walgreens out there. BD

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Walgreen Co. announced Wednesday it is buying New York-based rival drugstore chain Duane Reade Holdings Inc. to expand its reach in the metropolitan area.

The $1.1 billion cash transaction, which includes some debt and is pending regulatory approval, is Walgreen's largest retail acquisition to date and is expected to close in the current fiscal year ended Aug. 31.

The deal will also give Walgreens an edge over its national rival CVS Caremark (CVS, Fortune 500), which operates just over 7,000 drugstores across the nation.

Duane Reade, owned by private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners, boasts the highest sales per square foot in the retail drugstore industry in the nation, and its sales reached an unaudited $1.8 billion in 2009.