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New Walgreens S.F. flagship site features baristas, ‘beauty advisers,’ fragrance bar
Walgreens’ new Union Square flagship is not your father’s drugstore.
Walgreens’ flagship San Francisco store, which opens Wednesday, is not your parents’ drugstore.
In fact, it’s nothing like the Walgreens that’s been in the same Union Square location since 1946, nor like any other Walgreens store in Northern California.
Walk into the remodeled store, just seven
months in the making, and the first thing you see is the Upmarket Cafe with Walgreens baristas making espressos, cappuccinos, chai lattes and the like. No drugs, toothpaste or toilet paper on the ground floor. They’re on a new upper level, playing second fiddle to a department store-size cosmetics section manned by professional “beauty advisers” and stocked with 2,500 products, some to sample at the fragrance bar, next to where you can get your eyebrows done.
The men’s skin care line should be in this summer.
“We’re going from our mass market products to a higher level touch and service,” Sylvia Van Loveren, a Walgreens vice president of real estate, said as we surveyed the wares.
Downstairs, taking up half the 18,000-square-foot store, are your “consumables” — i.e. food and drink. Not just your everyday bottled water, candy and packaged goods. Nor even merely the fresher items, like precut sushi that you can find in a growing number of Walgreens stores these days.
We’re talking here of $194 bottles of Dom Perignon, $99 Stags Leap Cabernet Sauvignon — “no jugs or boxes,” said Van Loveren — plus locally sourced craft beers, Acme bread, goodies from San Francisco’s Cafe Madeleine and a raft of froyos and smoothies with cute hometown names like Chinatown Chiller and Pear 39 (kale, orange and cucumber added to the mix).
Next door to Uniqlo, over the road from H&M and a block north of Sephora, the transformed Walgreens store on Powell Street is a smart fit for the heavily trafficked, touristy Union Square. “It’s one of the highest pedestrian counts in our entire chain,” said Richard Ashworth, vice president of corporate operations.
It’s one of 10 similarly conceptualized flagships in major urban areas, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and, last week, Boston that Walgreens has rolled out since 2011. “The flagship stores reflect our transformation from a traditional drugstore into a retail health and daily living destination,” said Mark Wagner, operations and community management president of the Deerfield, Ill., company.
It also represents the everexpanding reach of Walgreens, which owns 8,300 stores in 50 states. The company recorded $72 billion in sales in 2012, is ranked 37th on the Fortune 500 list of public companies, and its stock price is at a record high.
In 2010, Walgreens, already the nation’s largest drugstore chain, bought the 257-store New York chain Duane Reade for $1.1 billion, and last year it acquired a 45 percent stake in the British chain Boots (formerly Boots the Chemist), with its 2,600 stores, for $6.7 billion. It’s scheduled to buy the remaining 55 percent of Boots in the next two years, making Walgreens the largest drugstore chain in the world.
Perhaps to mark the tie-in, and as an example of where Walgreens is going, Boots No. 7 Protect & Perfect Intense Beauty Serum (antiaging cream, $25) is one of the first displays to catch your eye when you enter the upper level of the San Francisco flagship.
However, Walgreens’ original function as a pharmacy is not being forgotten. Come the merger, Walgreens will be the world’s biggest purchaser of prescription drugs, and Nimesh Jhaveri, the company’s executive director of pharmacy, wants to see it play a more active role in the nation’s health care.
Rather than getting your flu shot sitting in an aisle outside the counter, you’ll be escorted to a private room with a couch next to the upstairs pharmacy, where you can discuss with your pharmacist all sorts of health issues and, state regulations permitting, have some basic tests done.
“We want to bring the pharmacist out front, in a more traditional relationship with the customer,” said Jhaveri. “If we can get more information into a patient’s hands, the better, and perhaps more cheaply, his health will be served.”
On the other hand, Walgreens also kindly provides a self-serve machine “dispensing 130 varieties of Coca-Cola fountain drinks.” Hipster alert: Converse is coming to Union Square, with a stand-alone store.
The 8,200-square-foot store, at Market and Fourth, opens next month with a full array of Converse footwear and apparel, including a line of Chuck Taylor All Stars ($65 a pair) and a customize-yourself facility.
It will be the fifth store opened by the Nike subsidiary, joining Santa Monica, New York, Boston, and Paramus, N.J.
“San Francisco is a city that exemplifies our customer, and from a cultural perspective, it is a creative hub for art and music, which is perfect for our brand,” said Jon Tappan, a global merchandise manager for the 105-year-old Massachusetts shoe company.