CVS Caremark stopped selling cigarettes and other CVS tobacco products yesterday at its 7,700 pharmacies — an industry-first for a national pharmacy chain and almost a month earlier than planned — and changed its name to CVS Health to better-position itself as a health care provider.
The Woonsocket, R.I.-based company also announced the launch of a personalized smoking-cessation program.
CVS has been trying for a long time to integrate its business more closely with other health care providers, according to Meredith Adler, an analyst at Barclays Capital.
"There is a shortage of primary-care physicians, there are more services that pharmacists themselves can provide, and there's certainly a great deal of opportunity to help people with chronic health conditions," she said. "To be selling cigarettes ... and at the same time wanting to help people improve their health … was inconsistent."
The company said in February that it would forgo the low-margin tobacco sales by Oct. 1, a move that will cost it almost $2 billion in annual sales.
In the wake of the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act adding 8 million people to insurance rolls nationwide, emphasizing its health care offerings and positioning itself as a preferred partner for U.S. companies and insurers should make up for the lost tobacco sales, David Larsen, an analyst with Boston's Leerink Partners, told Bloomberg.
"They are expanding on the basis of in-store clinics, deeper relationships with health plan customers and integrated health systems around the country," Larsen said.
CVS' announcement yesterday garnered a shout-out from the White House.
"As one of our country's largest retailers and pharmacies, the newly named CVS Health is setting a powerful example that we hope others in the industry will follow," White House press secretary Josh Earnest said in a statement.
CVS yesterday pointed to its own self-funded study that showed city bans of tobacco sales at retail pharmacies in San Francisco in 2010 and Boston in 2011 were "associated with up to a 13.3 percent reduction in purchasers of tobacco products."
Its removal of the tobacco products has resulted in "some small adjustments" to store employees' schedules, CVS spokesman Mike DeAneglis said. "But in the majority of our stores, any reduction in hours will be minimal, and we don't expect it to result in any loss of jobs," he said.
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