Laura Washington: Walgreens is closing stores and creating pharmacy deserts on Chicago’s South and West sides

Walgreens plans to shut down hundreds of stores across the nation, including five in Chicago. Community leaders here are steamed. What’s the fuss about a drugstore? It’s about what’s in a drugstore.

Medicines, medical necessities, groceries and household products. Drugstores, for some, are singular lifelines, lifesavers and economic drivers. Last fall, the Deerfield-based Walgreens Boots Alliance announced it would close about 1,200 of its stores over the next three years, as part of its “Transformational Cost Management Program.



” The five local Walgreens stores to be closed are all on the city’s South and West sides, serving African American and Latino neighborhoods: West Englewood, South Shore, Bronzeville (in the Lake Meadows Shopping Center), Little Village and South Chicago. The stores are set to close next month. No suburban or North Side stores are on the chopping block.

“The idea that it’s closing, I just can’t even believe it,” said Delmarie Cobb, who for decades has lived steps away from the Lake Meadows store near 35 th Street and South King Drive. That store has been at that location for 71 years, she said. Cobb, a prominent political consultant and activist, is “up in arms,” she told me.

She has launched a petition drive on Change.org , calling on the company to “reverse” the closings, which will “profoundly” affect communities of color. “For many, especially our senior population, this decision can be life-changing, as they rely on local pharmacies to fill essential prescriptions,” the petition asserts.

“We urge Walgreens to consider the impact of the company’s decision to divest from our communities, prioritize the needs of longtime customers and halt the impending closure of these five stores.” Cobb is calling on elected officials, community leaders and medical professionals to join the effort. “It’s got to be at least 20 senior buildings in a 2-mile radius of that Lake Meadows location, and it’s going to create a pharmacy desert,” she said.

The Walgreens closest to the Lake Meadows store is at 47 th Street and Lake Park Avenue, more than 2 1⁄2 miles away. Pharmacy deserts are a growing phenomenon, an analysis published last year in U.S.

Pharmacist shows. A pharmacy desert is “described as a low-access community where the residents have to travel farther to get to the nearest pharmacy to fill their prescriptions.” According to its most recent earnings report, Walgreens admitted it was losing money at the rate of $1 billion a month, a recent editorial in the Chicago Tribune reports.

Data shows that about one-quarter of Walgreens’ 8,700 locations were considered “unprofitable” by the company and targeted for possible closure, NBC affiliate WMAQ-Ch. 5 reported. “It is never an easy decision to close a store,” the company said in a statement.

“We know that our stores are important to the communities that we serve, and therefore do everything possible to improve the store performance. When closures are necessary, like those here in Chicago, we will work in partnership with community stakeholders to minimize customer disruptions.” Those stores are commercial anchors and lifelines in her community, Cobb said.

“I’m the fourth generation living in this three-block area, and (the Lake Meadows) shopping center is the very reason this community has not fallen.” Black and brown consumers, especially seniors, are more dependent on the pharmaceuticals and other basic products these neighborhood stores provide, but have the least mobility and access to alternatives, such as online commerce. These are the same communities that lack access to grocery stores and healthy food options, known as food deserts.

The same communities are at the highest risk for disease and premature deaths. “In the Black community, you’ve got food deserts. Now you’re going to have medicine deserts.

And so, when you talk about the disparity in health, in how long Black people live, I mean, these are the things that add to that,” Cobb declared. “These are the reasons why Black people don’t live as long as their white counterparts, because you have all these things going against you.” As more pharmacies close, “you’re going to see even worse disparities in medication access and vaccination rates, and I think disparities in health outcomes will also worsen,” Dima Qato told the Tribune .

“I think it’s going to get worse unless something is done at a policy level to prevent it,” said Qato, an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Alfred E. Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, who has studied the impact of the closures. Race matters.

There are three Walgreens stores within a mile of where I live on the North Side. Walgreens said it’s a business decision. I asked Cobb: Should this flailing company be expected to prop up unprofitable stores? “Some of these business decisions have been of their own making.

I mean, they’ve been bad business decisions,” she said. “And so now that you’ve made all these bad business decisions, you’re now deciding to claw your way back on the backs of people who can least afford it. And that’s what they always do.

” Always. Laura Washington is a political commentator and longtime Chicago journalist. Her columns appear in the Tribune each Wednesday.

Write to her at [email protected] . Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.

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