Walgreens’ designs prove an upgrade for shoppers

DEERFIELD, Ill. – Not long ago, you always knew where to find a Walgreens — at the corner of happy and homely.

Walgreens’ banal, cookie-cutter buildings made one part of America indistinguishable from another. Inside were narrow, harshly-lit aisles piled high with merchandise. Squawking intercoms summoned you to the pharmacy.

These days, the Deerfield, Ill.-based drugstore giant — with a corporate name of Walgreen Co. — is writing a more sophisticated design prescription: Its latest crop of stores has a crisp contemporary look that’s airy, roomy, even occasionally playful. The fresh approach extends to exteriors, which are no longer drab and interchangeable.

I wouldn’t call it “drugstore chic,” but let’s give credit where it’s due: When it comes to design, the company is finally entering the 21st century, where the quality of store experience matters as much as selection, price and location. The new look is an integral part of Walgreens’ folksy effort to brand itself as the drugstore “at the corner of happy and healthy.”

“People used to define convenience as … really close and really small,” said Ken Nisch, chairman of JGA, a Detroit-based retail brand and experience strategist. “Now they define convenience as a store with everything I want, even if it’s an edited version. I can get sushi, nail polish and People magazine all in the same place, and I can do it in a way that’s trendy and very contemporary and efficient.

“They’ve really turned the whole idea (of a drugstore) upside down.”

Walgreen has eight drugstores in the Lansing area — two in Lansing, two in Delta Township and one each in Grand Ledge, Okemos and St. Johns. They don’t stock sushi but they do have nail polish. Some, stores, including the newest in Okemos that opened in 2011, has some of the more contemporary design features.

The change is evident in more than 640 Walgreens stores that were remodeled or built new, and is most apparent in 14 opulent flagship stores that stretch from New York’s Empire State Building to Chicago’s Wrigley Building to the Hollywood corner of Sunset and Vine.

Open since June and roughly twice the size of a typical Walgreens, the Wrigley Building outlet has pumped new life into the base of the skyscraper. Despite a confusing layout and some cartoonish design moves, like a color-splashed mural of the Chicago skyline, the two-level flagship is a drugstore palace.

From the flagships, which the company considers laboratories to try out new ideas, changes are filtering down to smaller stores — a shift evident, to varying degrees, in wider aisles, higher ceilings, improved artificial and natural light and color-coded “neighborhoods” organized around cosmetics, health care and other product lines.

These are no little design shifts, given the company’s vast reach. As ranked by the number of stores, it is the nation’s largest pharmacy chain, with 8,000-plus outlets serving an estimated 8 million people a day. That’s more U.S. stores than Burger King. So it is not for nothing that the design world has been showering Walgreen with praise that once would have been unthinkable.

In its September issue, the trade journal VMSD (an abbreviation of “Visual Merchandising and Store Design”) heralds Walgreen as the 2014 retailer of the year. Last year, a Chicago-based historic preservation advocacy group, Landmarks Illinois, gave Walgreen an award for another of its flagship stores, a 1920s neo-classical bank building. Its ceiling, which has six-sided coffers, has been beautifully restored. In the basement, the old bank vault is now the “vitamin vault.”

Walgreen declines to break out sales numbers for outlets using the new format. Called “Well Experience” stores, they feature the new designs as well as expanded product lines in cosmetics, fresh foods and consumer health care, a field in which the company and other drugstores are looking to boost as the Affordable Care Act takes effect.

However, in an interview, Tim Welsh, Walgreen’s senior director for store design, planning and development, said the new formats have helped to improve year-to-year store sales. “They absolutely make a difference,” he said.

“Our older stores were stacked high with merchandise up to the ceiling,” he added. “As competition rose, once the recession hit and shopper behavior started to change, we had to make our stores more customer-focused.”

Since the company rolled out the “Well Experience” model five years ago, it has opened 642 of the stores, including remodeled and new outlets. The company expects several hundred more to follow next year.

To be sure, the company’s new format has encountered bumps. In March, a consumer advocacy group alleged that the format, which encourages pharmacists to sit at desks instead of staying behind the counter, had led to patient privacy violations, such as medical histories that could be seen on desks. In May, however, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found the new format provided the needed safeguards to protect patient information.

On the whole, the change has been a big plus, starting to eliminate the generic “prototype” look that has blighted so many American towns.

“We’ve really taken away the word ‘prototype’ from our vocabulary,” Welsh said.

Which is wonderful, but the company still has to revamp or replace thousands of stores before it truly can be said to have left behind the corner of happy and homely.