The Walgreens in Cambridge’s Central Square is one of 1,200 the chain is closing nationwide. Signs posted at the store entrance say the last day is March 27, and shelves are already emptying.
The chain lost $3 billion in its most recent quarter and is not alone from claiming losses from a changing retail environment – competitors CVS and Rite Aid are closing U.S. stores too. Like the other 499 stores Walgreens plans to shut down this fiscal year, the Central Square store is unprofitable, according to the company.
It is a third wave of store closings for Walgreens in recent years, making for about 2,000 stores closed in a decade; there are now around 8,500 locations, according to company financial disclosures.
This location opened in 2002, replacing a Woolworth store that closed in October 1997.
The store at 625 Massachusetts Ave. sells a variety of food and drink, housewares and beauty and medical supplies. The store still has a photo department and a well-used pharmacy that caused distress when workers were in short supply in 2022 coming out of the Covid pandemic.
In the main store, items such as cereals and chips, trash bags and sodas are thinning out rapidly.
“We’re not getting shipping in. What we have is what we have,” said manager Charles Brusch on Wednesday. “Shelves will start to be empty.”
That does not yet apply to the pharmacy, which is still allowed to restock, a worker said. The location has not been told the cut-off date for medicine orders, but is already referring customers to pick up prescriptions at the 330 River St., Cambridgeport, location a little over a half-mile to the southwest. A CVS with a pharmacy is across the street in Central Square, but not all health care plans may allow customers to switch.
Michael Monestime, president of the Central Square Business Improvement District, said he learned of the closing this week.
It is “a significant loss for the community. For many years, Walgreens – and before it, Woolworth’s 5 & 10 – provided essential services like prescription fulfillment and everyday items for seniors and local residents,” Monestime said. “Large retail spaces like this are difficult to lease, and a vacancy of this size is a concern for Central Square. However, we remain hopeful that this change presents an opportunity for a new business that will be a great addition to the area and serve the needs of the community.”
A blow to community
Shopping at the store on Wednesday was Susan Fleischmann, executive director of Cambridge Community Television until stepping down in early 2021 and a Central Square resident since 1980. She shared Monestime’s worries.
“Retail is a wreck across the board, and especially in Central Square,” said Fleischmann, who’s most often in the store for holiday items such as Valentine’s Day cards, inexpensive toys for young loved ones, the photo shop and the pharmacy. “We’ve seen things hollowed out. It’s really hard to keep our community together when we don’t see each other in the street and meet in the stores.”
Fleischmann wondered what could fill the Walgreens space, 20,230 square feet on the first floor of a three-story 1950 building owned by Lincoln Property of Boston that has vacancies throughout.
“There are all these very large spaces that it’s really hard to fill with anything but big-box kind of stores, and it’s too small for a big box,” Fleischmann said.
Workers will transfer
Brusch, who has been at the store for only two months, said the Walgreens location has around 27 full- and part-time staff, including seven in the pharmacy, and they would probably be offered work in other locations. “Walgreens prides itself on getting people into other positions,” he said.
Walgreens has another store near Porter Square and in Somerville near Inman Square that has been less affected by shortages, and on Somerville Avenue between Porter and Union squares.
During a Wednesday afternoon visit, there was a steady trickle of customers coming in to cruise the shelves and pick up candy or something for the home. Within 20 minutes all had left and the store was deathly quiet.
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Wow. It’s hard to understand why this location would close, in such a busy neighborhood. Like other Walgreens locations, it has its problems—you can never count on everyday items being stocked—and one wonders if the lack of profitability was self-inflicted. But at least I’ve found that the pharmacy was more reliable than CVS.
This leaves both Harvard and Central squares with only CVS.
The pharmacy at the Porter Square Walgreens, about half way between Porter and Harvard, is excellent. Great staff, much better service than the overwhelmed crew at CVS
@DanZ it’s not that hard to understand why, if you go in there frequently. They do their best, but the store is never that crowded, and the shoplifting is absolutely insane. I would estimate that on 5-10% of my visits there is someone brazenly shoplifting. I’m sure it creates a fairly unenjoyable, and certainly unprofitable, environment for the employees.
This will be a very difficult space to occupy. Central remains the most talked about and least acted on square in Cambridge.
I suppose this means that soon I will have to manufacture my own insect repellent.