Replies to post #71017 on Biotech Values

[Democritus_of_Abdera]

WAG year over year sales increase...

Dew, you could attribute Walgreen’s 4.9% year over year December pharmacy sales increase to the increase in the number of weekdays, however, I attribute it to the increase in the number of comparable stores. The number of comparable Walgreen stores increased about 10% during the past year. (There were 5580 total stores as of Nov 2006 and 6139 total stores as of Nov 2007 resulting in a 559 increase of comparable stores in Nov 2008 over Nov 2007). There were 7,123 total stores in Nov 2008.

This analysis is based upon the use of “comparable stores” in the Walgreen’s press release, see: http://news.walgreens.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=5132 . The press has used the term “same-stores”, see: http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idINN0538472320090105?rpc=44 .

Perhaps, I am making too much of this semantic difference and the numbers actually refer to a per store metric. If so, then stores open less than a year would need to have had negative sales numbers; i.e.the numbers given for total sales from all stores are $6.1B in Dec 2008 vs $5.5B in Dec 2007. Thus, sales/store in 2008 were $0.86M/store vs $0.90M/store in 2007.

Irrespective of the attribution, the sales increase is not as impressive as it might first appear.