Sitting at the intersection of retail and health care, 2020 and 2021 have been profoundly challenging years for the retail drug store channel.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic had once-in-a-generation impacts across the full business — both pharmacy and retail. On the pharmacy side, there were shifts in chronic versus acute prescription volumes, channel growth in mail-order and delivery, large-scale rollout of COVID-19 testing capabilities, and most recently, a heroic effort to deploy COVID-19 vaccines at scale. On the retail side, we saw store traffic decreases, customer stockpiling pressuring supply chains, explosive e-commerce growth, and highly variable category-level performance driven by changes in consumer behavior.