Rite Aid Rite Aid is a retail drugstore chain that believes in quality. They operate over 3,800 drugstores in 30 eastern states. Rite Aid offers health and personal care products, office supplies, cosmetics, seasonal merchandise, a variety of brand names, and a private label product line. Many of their stores also offer additional services such as one ? hour photo, fax and copying services, 24 hour stores, information lines, drive through windows, and natural health centers. My expectations of Rite Aid were very optimistic. I knew from experience that Rite Aid was a good place to have your prescriptions filled and you did not have to wait very long. I expected them to treat me and other customers with courtesy. I like a store that asks if I need assistance with finding something and I felt that Rite Aid was this type of store. I expected the store to be clean and have easy mobile isles. So many stores have the isles so full that you can not walk through them especially if you are handicapped and on a walker or in a wheelchair. I expected their products to be priced...
The substitutes is another big issue for Walgreens. The supermarket like Walmart has been going into drugstore business. As a supermarket, their products and services are wider, and they can provide the lower price due to bigger supplier and distribution network (Baeb, 2001). Currently, Walgreens has been fighting with specific medical services that has been mentioned in value chain section; prevention & wellness, treatment, and monitoring & management. To reduce the threat of substitutes, Walgreens would rather emphasize its business-level strategy. Also, it is better for Walgreens to have functional-level strategy to support its business-level strategy as well. The emphasized strategy from Porter 's generic strategies has been discussed later in this
Family Dollar was established in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1959 by a 21 year old entrepreneur named Leon Levine. He was interested in operating a low-overhead, self-service retail store. Levine’s main goal was to offer a variety of high quality merchandise to customers for under $2.00 (Family Dollar: History). If everything in the store wasn’t a dollar to begin with why did he name the store Family DOLLAR? The fact is that any person can be influenced in a different way just by the way someone words a sentence or phrase. A prime example of this is a Family Dollar store. The problem is that Family Dollar doesn’t sale everything in their store for a dollar, like a Dollar Tree does. Dollar Tree is seen to be one of the very few true dollar stores there is that sales everything for a dollar. The name of the store Family Dollar just catches everyone’s eye and makes them think that they are getting a better deal on the items they purchase there. The fact is that everyone who goes into the store is thinking that generally everything in the store is going to be a dollar, but it’s not. That is the purpose of the usage of words in the title of the store. Dollar General is also another store that has the same usage of words in their store name to make their customers think the same way. Every customer is baited into thinking that everything in the store is going to be a dollar but in the end their thoughts will be different.
The primary problem would be the structure of the organization. This is due to the fact that there are thirteen departments in total which would lead to the failure of the ability to concentrate on long term viability of the business.
With the Walgreen's proposed acquisition of Rite Aid, we posed 3 questions to our members. Here are the questions and the results:
Did you know that the CVS in “CVS Pharmacy” stands for “Convenience, Value, and Service?” CVS is a known pharmacy innovation company with a simple and also very clear purpose: helping everyone on their road to better health. Tracing back there history through there retail, pharmacy benefit management and retail clinic roots, today CVS health is a pharmacy innovation company that is reinventing pharmacy. Their company has drastically grown and improved over the years, but their commitment to their customers, clients and communities has never wavered. CVS pharmacy headquarters is currently located in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. (“CVS history”, para. 1)
Walgreens is a very well known name when it comes to drugstores. However, most people don’t know how big “big” is. In this case it is 7,015 stores nationwide. On average, each store has 30 employees on staff. This means that the company has 211,000 employees working for them. This type of responsibility calls for an HR department. In this company however it is done a little differently. When it comes to hiring staff for a store, it is solely up to the store manager. The HR department functions as a reference source for the store managers only (typically in cases of discipline). This is a great undertaking for a store manager when they are first promoted. As a store manager, you are faced with ever...
Costco is one of the good companies in the USA. The company has quality products that function in four different department's food, health care, employee discount cost, and some types of delivery services. The company actually sells fewer kinds of products than Wal-Mart, Giant and others, however, this means that they can keep their costs down this way. They are also able to keep costs down by charging customers a yearly fee, which allows Costco to have more brand loyalty because of this. So, Costco is a good option because it has provided better services for many years.
Present day Federated consists of both Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s stores and operates in 34 states as well as Guam and Puerto Rico. While Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s provide both private and national brands and are similar in merchandising categories (men’s, women’s and children’s apparel, home décor, shoes, beauty, and accessories), they differ greatly in culture. Bloomingdale’s, being more upscale, targets consumers that are more concerned with trend and quality than they are price. Macy’s targets the more value oriented consumer and represents a broader Federated clientele. Macy’s represents 423 of the 459 Federated locations while Bloomingdale’s represents only 36 locations. Because I can better relate to the value conscious consumer of the Macy’s division and because they represent such a large portion of Federated, I will further explore their current characteristics and behaviors that suggest that they possess qualities of both monopolistic competition and oligopolies.
One of the biggest competitors is known as Wal-Mart. With a revenue of $485.651 billion, Wal-Mart is definitely the world’s largest company. According to Walmart’s website, “it operates over 11,000 retail units under 65 banners in 28 countries and employs 2.2 million associates around the world.” Offering numerous items at their lowest prices, Wal-Mart, itself, is the biggest challenger for Costco. At the same time, Sam’s Club is also owned and operated by Wal-Mart and it takes even more profits away from Costco. While the customers can go buy things at Wal-Mart without the membership, Wal-Mart uses the same membership-only strategy for Sam’s Club like Costco. For instance, Sam’s Club offers membership-only services with an annual fee of $45. Sam’s Club offers a wide product category, and it sells almost the same things as Costco. Sam’s Club has 652 warehouses, and its net sales are above $58 billion. Even though Costco is highly concentrated in California, Sam’s Club is evenly spread across the United States. Moreover, Sam’s Club is the only
In 1958, Alex Grass incorporated Rack Rite Distributors, Inc. Grass opened Rite Aid’s first store, through Rack Rite, in 1962, as a Thrift D Discount Center, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. 1963, Thrift D Discount Center became a drugstore chain when they opened five more stores. In 1965, the Thrift D Discount Center expanded to five northeastern states by quickly acquiring and opening new stores. In 1966, the first Rite Aid store opened in New Rochelle, New York. 1976, they introduced seventy Rite Aid private label products. The next year, 1968, they changed their name, officially, to Rite Aid Corporation and started trading on the American Stock Exchange. Then, two years later, in the beginning of the 1970’s, they moved to the New York Stock Exchange. Again, two years later, 1972, they had been operating 267 stores in 10 states. 1981, nine years later, they became the third-largest retail drugstore chain in the country. In 1983, they made over $1 billion in sales. In 1987, their twenty-fifth anniversary was celebrated and they, by then, had 420 stores in 9 states and Washington D.C., as well as Pennsylvania, where they started their business as a Thrift D Discount Center, in Scranton. Their market had greatly expanded and they had passed the 2,000-store mark to become the nation’s largest drug store chain in terms of store count. Eight years later, in 1995, they acquired Perry Drug Stores, the biggest chain of drugstores in Michigan. It was their largest acquisition to date. By then they had operated nearly 3,000 stores. That same year, Martin Grass succeeded his father Alex Grass, as Chairman and CEO of Rite Aid. The year after that, they had grown out to the West Coast and the Gulf Coast, adding more than ...
Wal-mart is currently the world’s largest company. It has seen continuous growth and financial success since it was founded in 1962. Today it is living off of a previous reputation of solid ethical business practices that are no longer being exercised. Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-mart, was considered to be “freakishly cheap… Cost-cutting was an obsession in the Wal-mart culture… on business trips, everyone, including the boss, flew coach, and hotel rooms were always shared.” (reclaimdemocracy.org. 2006). This was only part of the reason for Sam Walton’s success.
To start off, chain pharmacies which are sort of like community or retail pharmacies are places such as; CVS, Walgreens, Publix, any grocery store, etc. If you ever ask a pharmacist or pharmacy technician that works in this kind of environment, most likely they will tell you “it’s all about the people.” For over 22 years, pharmacists have ranked near the top of the Gallup Poll
In 1945, Sam Walton opened his first variety store and in 1962, he opened his first Wal-Mart Discount City in Rogers, Arkansas. Now, Wal-Mart is expected to exceed “$200 billion a year in sales by 2002 (with current figures of) more than 100 million shoppers a week…(and as of 1999) it became the first (private-sector) company in the world to have more than one million employees.” Why? One reason is that Wal-Mart has continued “to lead the way in adopting cutting-edge technology to track how people shop, and to buy and deliver goods more efficiently and cheaply than any other rival.” Many examples exist throughout Wal-Mart’s history including its use of networks, satellite communication, UPC/barcode adoption and more. Much of the technology that was utilized helped Sam Walton more efficiently track what he originally noted on yellow legal pads. From the very beginning, he wanted to know what the customers purchased, what inventory was selling and what stock was not selling. Wal-Mart now “tracks on an almost instantaneous basis the ordering, shipment, and delivery of literally every item it sells, and that it requires its suppliers to hook into the system, enabling it to track most goods every step of the way from the time they’re made and packaged in the factories to when they’re carried out store doors by shoppers.” “Wal-Mart operates the world’s most powerful corporate computing system, with a capacity (as of late 1999) of more than 100 terabytes of data (A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, or roughly the equivalent of 250 million pages of text.).
Rite Aid Corporation which ranks as the third largest retail drugstore chain in the United states, control about 2,380 drugstores in 28 states across professionals pharmacy service, a full selection of health and personal care products, an assortment of general products in the nation and in the District of Columbia ( Rite Aid, 2007 ). Rite Aid has a great management team to help them with their success their team includes Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Special Advisor, Corporate Strategy ,Chief Operating Officer ,Chief Administrative Officer ,Executive Vice President – Pharmacy, Executive Vice President, Store Operations ,Executive Vice President and General Counsel( Rite Aid, 2007). Differentiate between management and leadership is very different for example, response to its huge losses, Rite Aid has said it expects to spend more than $94 million to reassess and restate its financial results for 1998 and 1999( ). Furthermore, that includes rerunning mainframe-based accounting systems and paying IT people overtime to work with internal and external accountants and auditors during the process. Still, Rite Aid does not plan to replace its combination homegrown Computer Corp. accounting system
Pharmacy is a very misunderstood career in the medical field. Many people believe that pharmacists only count and sort pills, but there is actually much more than what meets the eye. Pharmacists have a variety of responsibilities that they perform throughout their careers. They often fill prescriptions for patients, which does involve counting and sorting pills. However, they take it a step further, and work with patients to ensure all their current medications won 't have many negative effects when taken together. They also give instructions on how to take medications, and advise patients on various health topics, such as exercise and diets. They need to keep track of all important insurance forms and other records for their patients, and