This mega-store mirage flies in the face of contemporary retailing logic. Best Buy is all but finished, Barnes & Noble, KMart and Sears are at death's doorstep, Supervalue is closing Albertsons right and left and Circuit City, Tweeter, Linens & Things and countless others have been wiped off the face of the earth. Walmart has radically slowed the growth of super centers, opting for smaller... not bigger footprints.
This SUSHI thing just drives me crazy as an apparent lynchpin in Walgreens "new" strategy; sushi is NOT even a healthy food item that approaches the "wellness" mantra, except for a very few veggie items which almost all are low in cholesterol but out to lunch in hypertensive sodium content. And the overhead cost of sushi chefs, ingredients, spoilage write-offs and required and expensive HACCP food safety training make such a strategy ridiculous except in a true restaurant setting that serves huge volumes of Japanese entree's. Even Dunkin' Donuts learned the lesson (the hard way) that you could not afford the overhead to make fresh donuts in all those little stores, and went to the food equivalent of a central fill pharmacy... area bakeries with local, logistic deliveries to stock the shelves.
I actually LIKE sushi, but this ridiculous infatuation at Walgreens is both disturbing and stupid. What's next... fried Twinkies? Alfalfa sprout smoothies? Leech therapy in the pharmacy? Dried cuttlefish in the munchies aisle?
Walgreens is a pharmacy. When it grows up, it needs to find a way to make money for shareholders as a pharmacy. Until management has an Epiphany and decides to chart a pragmatic, cost-effective restrategizing of its business plan to address such an objective, investors will flounder and face huge risks because the competition in this sector is NOT stagnant.
Sorry if I ranted. But this is just, plain STUPID for an iconic large cap player with a heritage it is abandoning at the speed of sound for arcane, lunatic adventures in Lalaland. Maybe Pessina can rein in some sanity in forward planning before the empire collapses under the extreme weight of management at the top of "the (sushi) food chain"?
GLTA.
Yank
