Walgreens retreats as CVS quietly takes over suburban pharmacies

Aditya Raghunath

Sun, September 13, 2026 at 1:17 AM GMT+3 4 min read

CVS -0.66%

Drive through almost any American suburb, and you will spot it: a shuttered Walgreens with a handwritten sign in the window telling customers their prescriptions moved down the road. More often than not, that road leads to a CVS.

This pattern is playing out in strip malls across the country, quietly reshaping who controls the neighborhood pharmacy business without either company having to compete openly.

Walgreens is not trimming a handful of weak stores. It is closing roughly 1,200 of its approximately 8,500 U.S. locations through 2027.

CVS (CVS), meanwhile, is opening new stores and absorbing customers who no longer have a choice.

Walgreens stock exits public markets amid closures

In August 2025, Walgreens completed a $10 billion sale to private equity firm Sycamore Partners, taking the 124-year-old chain private for the first time.

According to a company statement, Mike Motz was named chief executive, replacing Tim Wentworth, who will stay on as a director. John Lederer, a senior advisor to Sycamore, became executive chairman.

"As a private organization, alongside our dedicated team members, we are renewing our focus on our core pharmacy and retail platform, our stores and our customer experience," Motz stated.

Going private removed Walgreens stock from the daily scrutiny of Wall Street, and that freedom appears to have sped up the closures.

Company leadership has pointed to shrinking pharmacy reimbursement rates, weaker retail traffic, and competition from Amazon Pharmacy as reasons roughly a quarter of stores no longer fit the chain's strategy.

CVS stock benefits without lifting a finger

CVS has not needed a marketing campaign or a price war to gain ground.

Federal and state rules require an orderly transfer of prescription records when a pharmacy closes, and in several markets, these scripts land at the nearest CVS.

Decades of overlapping suburban footprints mean a Walgreens closing is often just a mile or two from an open CVS door.

Foot traffic data shows how sticky the trend has become. Even as both chains shrink their overall store counts, the combined share of pharmacy visits keeps climbing.

More Retail:

CVS and Walgreens together now handle nearly 40% of all U.S. retail prescription sales.

CVS also has a structural edge. Its ownership of Caremark, one of the three dominant pharmacy benefit managers in the country, gives it a vertically integrated advantage that helps absorb reimbursement pressure that hits pure retail operators harder.

That advantage showed up in CVS's second-quarter 2026 results.

The company posted more than $106 billion in revenue and adjusted operating income of roughly $5.2 billion, up more than 35% from a year earlier.

Prem Shah, who leads CVS's pharmacy and consumer wellness business, credited a multi-year push on service and pricing for the momentum.

"We're still the best run national pharmacy in the country," Shah said on the company's August 2026 earnings call, pointing to same-store prescription volume growth of 7% and steady front store sales gains.

He added that CVS expects to keep growing "faster than the market" as pharmacies close around it.

A monopoly with no antitrust fight

For families near a closed Walgreens, the effect shows up fast, and it goes beyond prescriptions:

Fewer nearby options when picking where to fill a prescription
Longer drives for both medication and everyday items such as toiletries
Less pressure on pharmacies to compete on price or wait times
Convenience spending on snacks, greeting cards, and seasonal goods funneled to whichever store survives

States with the heaviest concentration of Walgreens locations, including Florida, Texas, Illinois, and California, are seeing the most visible closure activity, meaning the shift is landing hardest in the suburbs both chains spent decades building out.

What makes this consolidation unusual is how little regulatory attention it draws. There is no merger to review and no acquisition for the Federal Trade Commission to scrutinize.

Walgreens is simply choosing, store by store, to stop competing where it no longer sees it as worth the cost.

Traditional antitrust review is built to identify one company buying out or squeezing a rival.

With Walgreens now private, there is also far less public financial disclosure and shareholder pressure that might otherwise slow the closures down.

CVS benefits from Walgreens store closures.Smith Collection/Gado / Getty Images

What comes next for Walgreens and CVS

Walgreens has committed to continuing closures through 2027, with roughly 100 more expected before the end of 2026.

CVS's path forward looks straightforward by comparison.

It is opening small-format stores, folding in leftover Rite Aid real estate, and leaning into GLP-1 access through new partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to expand its pharmacy business further.

CVS raised its full-year 2026 adjusted earnings per share guidance to a range of $7.90 to $8.10, citing strength across every operating segment.

Whether regulators eventually take a closer look at that concentration remains an open question.

For now, the suburban pharmacy map is being redrawn one closed storefront at a time, and CVS is the chain collecting the pieces.

This story was originally published by TheStreet on Sep 12, 2026, where it first appeared in the Investing section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.