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Walgreens runs drugstores and pharmacies that fill prescriptions and sell everyday health and beauty products.
Walgreens Boots Alliance is a giant pharmacy chain. It runs two main businesses: a U.S. retail pharmacy arm, which is most of its money, and an international arm best known for Boots in the UK. Walk into a Walgreens or Duane Reade in America, or a Boots in Britain, and you're seeing the company in action. It's the store on the corner where people pick up prescriptions, grab cold medicine, buy toothpaste, and maybe get a flu shot at the counter.
Here's how it actually makes money. The pharmacy counter is the engine. Walgreens fills prescriptions, and it gets paid by insurance companies, government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and people paying cash. The stuff on the shelves — snacks, cosmetics, vitamins — is a smaller, lower-margin business that mostly exists to get you in the door. Think of it as a medical service station disguised as a convenience store: the real profit comes from the pills behind the counter, not the candy in front of it. Its international segment, built around Boots, sells beauty and health products and runs pharmacies too, and Boots is a cultural staple in the UK the way Walgreens is in America.
The company's recent story is mostly about trouble and reinvention. Online shopping and slim pharmacy margins squeezed the business, so it went on a cost-cutting spree and pushed harder into healthcare services, buying stakes in primary-care clinics and specialty pharmacy players to become more than just a place you buy aspirin. It's an enormous company — tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue — but it has struggled with debt and thin profits, and it's been closing stores to steady itself. It pays a dividend, though that payout has been under pressure as management tries to fix the core business. The big question for a curious reader is simple: can a store built for the last century of shopping find a reason for people to keep walking in the door?
Saved answer · last researched 15 Oct 2026