Walgreens has closed more than a dozen stores across at least twelve states so far in 2025, part of a multiyear retreat driven by weak sales, rising costs, and persistent theft, problems that show no sign of easing.
The Chicago-based pharmacy chain, the second-largest in the country with roughly 8,500 locations, is trimming stores in California, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington State, Washington, D.C., Wisconsin, New Jersey, and New York. Two locations in Bergen County, New Jersey, and one in Brooklyn have already gone dark, the New York Post reported.
The closures trace back to an October 2024 announcement in which Walgreens laid out plans to shutter roughly 1,200 underperforming stores over three years, including 500 in 2025 alone, and slash $1 billion in costs. Company executives told analysts at the time that one in four Walgreens stores were unprofitable. The company pointed to expiring leases, poor sales performance, and ongoing theft as the criteria for deciding which doors to lock.
But the plan shifted after private-equity firm Sycamore Partners acquired Walgreens and took it private. Under new ownership, the company pared its 2025 target from 500 closures down to fewer than 100. So far, more than a dozen have closed. Walgreens did not respond to the Post's request for comment on the current round of shutdowns.
The scale of the problem goes well beyond a handful of underperforming storefronts. Before the Sycamore deal, Walgreens had already closed 2,000 locations over the previous decade and reversed course on its VillageMD primary care clinic expansion, shutting down around 160 clinics. Roughly 2,100 of its U.S. stores were flagged as underperforming, about a quarter of the entire fleet, AP News reported.
CEO Tim Wentworth was blunt about the company's trajectory when he cut the annual earnings forecast from a range of $3.20, $3.35 per share down to $2.80, $2.95. The stock plunged 22% in a single day, its largest one-day percentage drop on record, falling to $12.19.
Wentworth told investors the chain's customers "have become increasingly selective and price sensitive in their purchases." He framed the restructuring in stark terms:
"We are at a point where the current pharmacy model is not sustainable and the challenges in our operating environment require we approach the market differently."
Tight prescription reimbursement rates, the fees insurers and government programs pay pharmacies to fill prescriptions, and growing competition from discount retailers have squeezed margins across the industry. Walgreens is not the only chain feeling the pressure. CVS has begun experimenting with pharmacy-only stores that strip out the retail aisles customers have come to expect, a sign that the traditional drugstore model is cracking from multiple directions.
If Walgreens is shrinking, its former rival Rite Aid has vanished entirely. The 60-year-old chain, founded in 1962, has closed every one of its remaining stores after filing for bankruptcy twice, first in October 2023, then again in May 2025. At its peak, Rite Aid operated more than 5,000 locations. By this spring, it still had about 1,250 open. Now it has none.
Peter Cohan, an associate professor of management practice at Babson College, told the Washington Examiner that corporate mismanagement played a large role in Rite Aid's collapse. Hundreds of opioid-related lawsuits and relentless competition from CVS and Walgreens finished the job.
The pattern is unmistakable. Rite Aid's wind-down gutted pharmacy access in rural communities across states like New Hampshire, where residents already faced long drives to fill prescriptions. When chains pull out of neighborhoods, whether because of theft, low reimbursements, or bad management, the people left behind are not corporate shareholders. They are seniors on fixed incomes, parents with sick children, and communities that relied on a corner pharmacy as a lifeline.
Walgreens has repeatedly cited theft as a factor in its closure decisions, and the company is not alone in naming it. Organized retail crime, coordinated shoplifting rings that target high-value merchandise for resale, has accelerated the retreat of national chains from urban neighborhoods and high-crime corridors.
The result is a vicious cycle. Stores close because theft makes them unprofitable. Neighborhoods lose pharmacy access. Remaining stores absorb more traffic and more crime. Milwaukee has already lost multiple Walgreens locations as pharmacy deserts spread and crime drives retailers out of the communities that need them most.
For customers caught in the current round of closures, Walgreens says it will offer 90 days of free prescription delivery. Prescriptions will also be automatically accessible at other Walgreens locations. That is a stopgap, not a solution, especially for elderly or homebound patients who depended on a store within walking distance.
Sycamore Partners' acquisition of Walgreens changed the calculus. Going private removed the pressure of quarterly earnings calls and public stock performance, and the new owners immediately dialed back the closure target from 500 stores in 2025 to fewer than 100. Whether that restraint reflects confidence in a turnaround or simply a desire to avoid fire-sale lease terminations remains unclear.
The broader retail landscape offers little comfort. Sears has been reduced to five U.S. stores after decades of closures and mismanagement, a cautionary tale about what happens when a once-dominant chain fails to adapt. Walgreens is not there yet, but the trajectory deserves honest scrutiny. A company that admits one in four of its own stores lose money is not describing a few bad leases. It is describing a structural failure.
The states affected so far in 2025 span the country, from deep-blue California and New York to red-state Texas and South Carolina. This is not a regional problem or a partisan one. It is a national one, and the common threads are the same everywhere: thin margins, rising costs, crime that goes unpunished, and a pharmacy reimbursement system that pays chains less than it costs to keep the lights on.
When the corner drugstore locks its doors for good, the people who pay the price are not executives or investors. They are the customers who showed up every month to pick up their prescriptions, and found the shelves already empty.