CVS Closing 10% Of Its Stores. Are Kalamazoo, Battle Creek Safe?

Here we go again. CVS, the nation's largest drugstore chain (in terms of market-share) has announced it will be shutting down 10% of its pharmacies in the next three years. Thanks to online retailers like Amazon, the company is also working to change its business model away from just selling drugs by adding "health hubs" that provided some medical care and services.

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To that end, they will be shutting down approximately 300 stores each year for the next three years or close to 10% or a thousand of its almost 10,000 retail locations. Six of those are in Kalamazoo and Battle Creek, along with Portage and Coldwater. There are CVS pharmacies embedded in Target stores in both Kalamazoo and Battle Creek. And a free-standing store at Campus Point shopping center, where the Video Hits Plus store (and also the legendary Electric Avenue nightclub) was, that was only built about five years ago. The company has not yet announced a specific list of which stores will close down.

All in all, CVS is in over 123 communities in Michigan.

The company pr says all the right things, with impacted employees being given other opportunities with remaining stores and other jobs that make sense; and that they're always worried about underserved communities. The closings begin this coming Spring 2022.

But one item stands out that makes you wonder if the company thought this out well enough. The company's president is leaving at the end of the year.