WOONSOCKET – Now that’s a lot of Halloween candy.
CVS Caremark Corp. on Thursday opened its 7,000th retail store in the Twin Cities suburb of Little Canada, Minn. Among those in attendance were Larry Merlo, president of CVS/pharmacy; Dan McElroy, commissioner of the Minn. Department of Employment and Economic Development; and Little Canada Mayor Bill Blesener.
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Merlo declared that CVS “has evolved from a health and beauty aids retailer to the nation’s leading retail pharmacy.”
The first CVS – short for “Consumer Value Stores” – was opened in 1963 in Lowell, Mass., by two brothers, Stanley and Sidney Goldstein, and a partner, Ralph Hoagland. Within a year, the chain had grown to 17 stores, and in 1967 the first stores with pharmacy departments opened in Warwick and Cumberland. Two years later, the retail holding company Melville Corp. bought CVS.
By 1980, CVS had grown to 408 stores, making it the 15th largest pharmacy chain in the U.S. The following year, the company broke ground on its Woonsocket headquarters.
In 1996, after shedding its other divisions, Melville Corp. changed its name to CVS Corp. Two years later, the company had 4,100 stores in 24 states. The company became CVS Caremark Corp. two years ago after merging with the pharmacy-benefit management firm Caremark Rx Inc.
CVS Caremark says it currently has more than 5,000 employees who live and work in Rhode Island and approximately 215,000 workers in total spread across 44 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The company’s annual revenue totaled $87 billion last year, putting it at No. 19 on the Fortune 500 list.
To mark the occasion Thursday, CVS said it would donate $75,000 in free seasonal flu shots to 2,500 unemployed Minnesotans. The company also said it would donate $7,000 to Courage Center, a rehabilitation center in Minnesota.
The milestone store’s opening took place on the same day that CVS rival Rite Aid Corp., the country’s third-largest drugstore chain, warned it expects to post a higher net loss this year than it had forecast in June, Bloomberg News.
Camp Hill, Pa.-based Rite Aid, which has closed stores and cut jobs to reduce costs, said it is on track to lose $390 million to $615 million on sales of up to $26.2 billion. The company blamed the “tough economy.”
Additional information is available at CVSCaremark.com.
