Earlier this year, health insurance giant Aetna was left broken-hearted when its $37 billion merger with Humana fell through because federal antitrust regulators apparently hate to see two mammoth insurers so in love with each other. But in this autumn season, there’s a rare bloom of corporate romance peeking out, as Aetna has reportedly found itself a suitor in the form of CVS Health. [More]
cvs
CVS Limiting Opioid Prescriptions Amid National Addiction Epidemic
By 9.21.17
Opioid prescription rates have more than tripled in the last two decades contributing to the nation’s current opioid addiction crisis, according to CVS. Now, the country’s largest pharmacy chain plans to do something about it by limiting opioid prescriptions. [More]
Need An Aspirin Or Some Deodorant? CVS Vending Machines Offer On-The-Go Options
By 9.11.17
We’ve all been there: You’re going about your day when suddenly, your stomach is growling, you’re struck with a blinding headache, and you realize you forgot to put on deodorant before you left the house. So now if you’re having one of those days when everything goes wrong, CVS wants you to hit up one of their brand-new vending machines for a quick fix. [More]
Women Accused Of Stealing $69K Worth Of Cosmetics From 32 Walgreens, CVS Stores
By 8.3.17
How many CVS and Walgreens locations do you have to steal lipstick, eyeshadow, concealer, and other beauty products from in order to get to $69,000? According to the Miami Dade Police Department the answer is 32. [More]
CVS Ditches Tanning Oil, Hides The Candy
By 6.28.17
We all refer to chains like CVS and Walgreens as “drugstores,” but they also sell everything from makeup to school supplies to snacks. However, CVS has been quietly revising its inventory and store layout to remove or deemphasize some items that are making customers less healthy. [More]
VA To Refer Some Vets To CVS MinuteClinics For Care
By 4.18.17 — Updated: 5.9.17
Veterans Administration, the VA and CVS have partnered for a test program that will have the pharmacy chain’s MinuteClinic urgent care centers treating some veterans for minor injuries and ailments. [More]
Man Locked Overnight In CVS Won’t Be Charged For Helping Himself To Snacks
By 4.6.17
If you found yourself inadvertently locked inside a CVS overnight, you could try out a bunch of cosmetics, wrap yourself in bandages and play “mummy,” or — like one Michigan man — help yourself to some food from the snack aisle. [More]
FDA Once Again Finds Elevated Levels Of Belladonna In Some Hyland’s Homeopathic Teething Tablets
By 1.27.17
Your infant is in pain from sore gums, and you want to do something to ease that pain, so maybe you consider a homeopathic treatment, with its heavily diluted active ingredients. What you may not know is that this seemingly innocuous teething tablet might contain unsafe levels of potentially dangerous belladonna. [More]
Walgreens Still Not Kicking Cigarette Habit, But Makes Some Products Less Visible
By 1.26.17
Three years after Walgreens said it would evaluate whether or not to continue selling cigarettes, and a year after it said it needed a bit more time to come to a resolution, shareholders for the drugstore chain are questioning the company’s choice to continue selling these cancer-causing products. [More]
CVS Selling Generic Alternative To EpiPen For Fraction Of The Price
By 1.12.17
Until the recent launch of the generic EpiPen, the only affordable competitor available to the emergency allergy treatment was Adrenaclick, but that drug was hard to find and some pharmacies charged nearly as much as they did for EpiPen. Now CVS says it is selling two-packs of an authorized generic of Adrenaclick at about one-sixth of the price tag for brand-name EpiPen. [More]
Guy Dresses As 12-Foot CVS Receipt, Redeems Costume’s Discount Code At Actual CVS
By 11.1.16
We’ve seen creative consumers poking fun at CVS for its infamously long receipts in the past, but one Halloween reveler took the idea a bit more literally by dressing as a giant CVS sales slip, complete with working discount code. [More]
CVS: Nope, We Aren’t Bringing Back The Target Pharmacy Bottles Everyone Loves
By 9.28.16
When Target reported its last batch of quarterly results, CEO Brian Cornell noted that visits to its in-store pharmacies were down after the conversion of those pharmacies to mini CVS stores. Readers explained to us why they left, and a popular reason was that CVS ditched Target’s easy-to-use red prescription bottles. Some customers held on to hope that CVS would deploy the bottles across its whole chain now that it owns the patent. Now we know the answer: nope. [More]
Where Did The Target Prescription Bottles Everyone Loves So Much Come From, Anyway?
By 8.24.16
We didn’t realize how much affection consumers had for Target’s ClearRX prescription bottling system until the bottles went away after CVS purchased Target’s pharmacies. Maybe customers themselves didn’t realize how attached they were to those bottles until they were consigned to memory, but with the CVS takeover of Target’s pharmacy business, they’re now gone. Why are people so attached to a prescription bottle, though? [More]
Customers: CVS Takeover Erased Everything Good About Target Pharmacies
By 8.23.16
One of the reasons that Target gave for its poor performance during a recent earnings call was that stores may have lost some foot traffic because of “some disruptions” when the discount store sold its pharmacy business to CVS. We wondered what that meant, and asked if readers had experienced those “disruptions.” They had, but the bigger problem is something that Target’s executives may not have realized: people filled prescriptions there because they liked things that Target did differently. [More]
CVS Launches Own Payment App Tied To Loyalty Program
By 8.11.16
Two years after CVS stopped taking Apple Pay, the pharmacy company has finally rolled out its own version of a mobile payment app tied to a loyalty program. [More]
Target And CVS Still Not Really Sure How Sales Work
By 7.7.16
When retail pricing defies common sense, that’s what we call Target Math. Sometimes it’s putting an item on sale for more than the original price, and sometimes it’s making items cost more per unit to buy in bulk than to buy just a few. They aren’t exclusive to Target, but for some reason these errors happen very often there. Here are some examples, which aren’t all from Target. Most of them are, though. [More]
CVS Will End Yard-Long Receipts (For Rewards Program Members)
By 5.23.16
Five years ago, a CVS representative explained that the reason why the pharmacy chain keeps printing such long receipts for customers is that customers like it. Maybe the public’s preferences have changed since 2011, since the chain officially announced today that it’s getting rid of the lengthy coupon-filled receipt streamers, and pre-loading coupons to customers’ rewards program cards instead. [More]
5 People Injured After SUV Turns CVS Store Into A Drive-In
By 5.4.16
In yet another incident of a driver creating a drive-thru store where there used to be none, an SUV slammed into a CVS in New York, leveling a glass and brick wall and sending five people to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries. [More]
