Tim Wentworth, CEO of Walgreens, acknowledged the company's recent store closures in a Jan. 8 interview with CNBC. But he said the company has a "leverageable asset" that will set the foundation for its health services business, well beyond its brick-and-mortar storefronts: consumer trust.
"When a Walgreens pharmacist calls you and says, 'Hey, your health plan would cover a shot for you, would you like to come into the store and we can give it to you?' You are four to five times more likely to respond to that than if someone from the insurance company calls you and tells you the same thing," Mr. Wentworth told CNBC's Jim Cramer.
"That's valuable for your Medicare Advantage plan, for example. That’s one little example of the way that we can leverage the platform and the trust to meaningfully help others that are in the ecosystem to achieve their goals."
Walgreens plans to cut approximately $1 billion in costs this year, much of which will come from VillageMD closures across five markets. Mr. Wentworth — who took the company's helm Oct. 23 — told CNBC the closures will ensure Walgreens has the "right optimized footprint" to lean into its healthcare goals.
"If you look at the stores and what goes on … 8 million vaccines this year at the back of the store already, that’s a healthcare business, right?" Mr. Wentworth said. "That's not just putting pills in bottles, that's people touching people — 85,000 of our people touching people every day, 10 million people that walk in our store."