Living up to its mission

About 20 years ago, I took a job as senior editor for Drug Store News. My first beat assignment was the OTC business and about a dozen retail companies, including CVS Pharmacy. Back then, CVS had just won the right to buy Revco, and it was making regular headlines in Drug Store News-FIRST — the weekly news-fax (remember those?) edition of DSN that would later become our daily e-newsletter DSN A.M. — as it completed the biggest integration of stores and systems in the history of the retail pharmacy business.

You could say I’ve seen a lot of change in that time, as CVS has evolved from what was then very much still a big Northeastern-based drug chain to the massive healthcare innovation company it is today. Its transformation over the years has been pretty remarkable.

But for all of the news it has made over the years, this might be the most important headline in the history of the company: CVS has never had a clearer, more defined sense of purpose than it does today. To steal a phrase from Brian Owens, director of retail insights for Kantar Retail, CVS knows who it is and what it stands for; it stands for health.

Today, its stores have become the physical embodiment of its mission to help people on their path to better health.

In this issue, DSN profiles what CVS Pharmacy is doing to re-engineer the entire store around health in an exclusive report.