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Rite Aid was the first to fold in a health-driven component to its loyalty program; as participants move up the Wellness+ ladder, they earn health-related perks, like free healthcare assessments.

Wellness+ membership grew 8% to 25 million, during the company’s recently reported second quarter. Members accounted for 74% of front-end sales, compared with 69% one year ago, as well as 68% of prescription sales.

DEERFIELD, Ill. — To help victims of Hurricane Sandy, customers shopping this week at any Walgreens or Duane Reade store in the United States will have the opportunity to make donations to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund in increments of $1, $2, $5 or $10, Walgreens announced Monday. The fundraising initiative is in addition to Walgreens' announcement last week that it would make a $250,000 contribution to the same fund.

 DEERFIELD, Ill. — Walgreens on Monday posted October sales of $6 billion, a drop of 2.1% as compared to October 2011. However, in only six weeks on the market, the chain's Balance Rewards loyalty program signed more than 28 million customers through Oct. 31. 

The results include the brunt of the impact from Hurricane Sandy — at the peak of the storm, approximately 750 of 1,400 stores in the impacted area were closed, Walgreens reported. Nearly all of those locations have since reopened.

LEMOYNE, Pa. — An interactive kiosk that allows customers to order prescription glasses and contact lenses online, a special shelf for diabetes products and a new interior design are among the newest features at Rite Aid’s newest version of its Wellness store in Lemoyne, Pa. A path of wooden flooring leads directly to the store’s pharmacy, whose immediate surrounding area has been cleared of merchandise to give it a more open look.

The opportunity for weight loss certainly hasn’t gone away — sales of diet-aid liquids were up 12.8% to $1.2 billion for the 52 weeks ended Sept. 9 across food, drug and mass (excluding Walmart), according to SymphonyIRI. And due to the temporary absence of GlaxoSmithKline’s Alli — unavailable because of a raw-ingredient sourcing issue — sales of diet-aid tablets are down with a 7% decline to a dollar base of 
$205.4 million. 
Alli had been removed from the market in March due to the third-party supply issue and returned in late June. 


The battle to capture and retain customers in a world where price, convenience and even customer service have become commoditized is in full swing. “The risk is you end up in a loyalty war [where] companies begin to use the loyalty scheme or the loyalty component of [the card] as another form of price escalation,” warned Bryon Pearson, president of LoyaltyOne and contributing editor to Colloquy, a magazine that has covered the loyalty marketing industry since 1990. “The intelligence that sits behind these programs is where the real value is,” he said.

Nielsen’s SVP consumer and shopper insights Todd Hale points to Kroger’s loyalty card as one of the best examples of consumer data aggregation. “Not only do you save money when you use their loyalty card, but you [also] save money no matter where you shop,” he said of Kroger’s 1-2-3 Rewards Visa Card, which is linked to its loyalty program.

That catapults actionable shopper data to an entirely new level — Kroger knows what its best customers are buying from other retailers.

WEST BRIDGEWATER, Mass. — Shaw's Supermarkets, a subsidiary of Supervalu, on Friday announced plans to reduce its store-level workforce by an estimated 700 positions. These reductions, which will occur across 169 Shaw's and Star Market stores in New England, and will be finalized by Nov. 3, the grocer stated.