The successor company to Walgreens held its first annual shareholders meeting late last month at Chicago’s Civic Opera House.

The successor company to Walgreens held its first annual shareholders meeting late last month at Chicago’s Civic Opera House.

And the event reconfirmed how little the Walgreens’ shareholders community understands the retailer’s merger with the former Alliance Boots or the huge benefits the merger promises for both companies.

Most Americans who care about such things continue, understandably, to view Walgreens as … well … Walgreens, the 8,300-store drug chain that has become synonymous with the American drug store. Similarly, they know little, and care less, about that European entity formerly called Alliance Boots, a company that operates drug stores and drug wholesalers in England, or Europe, or both, or globally, and has interests in health care.

What these people, who include not only Walgreens’ shareholders but larger segments of the U.S. media and financial communities, want to know is this: When will Walgreens begin to take on the characteristics of the Boots drug store chain … whatever those are?
Well, the answer is this: Never. The Walgreens-Alliance Boots merger is an alliance of two companies with similar but different ways of doing business, and a similar but different approach to the retail, wholesale and health care marketplaces. Joining them, then, potentially opens a wealth of possibilities which could, ultimately, produce the strongest health care-focused, retail-oriented company in the world.

The meeting held last month was in itself largely uneventful. Simply put, there was too much to talk about. So the retailer’s leadership, and particularly its executive vice chairman and acting chief executive officer, Steffano Pessina, decided to talk about none of it. The result was a 90-minute session spent mostly by telling shareholders that much had been accomplished, but much remained to be done.

What Pessina didn’t say was that Walgreens Boots Alliance is working to build a new company, one staffed by the best and brightest of both organizations, and one determined to build on the past while discarding larger portions of that past, and simultaneously adding the best elements of each organization to the strengths of the other. It is difficult to explain, especially to Americans who, understandably, see Walgreens as the quintessential American drug chain. Those American who have been to England see the Boots drug chain as something vastly different in assortment, in emphasis, in size, in customer focus. Understandably, with Pessina at the head of the new organization, they see Walgreens increasingly coming to resemble the Boots model.

In truth, there is much more to the Alliance Boots model than the Boots drug store, primarily its emphasis on drug wholesaling and health care. It is these elements that, the company’s senior managers hope, will increasingly come to influence the Walgreens model, making that model both more productive and more efficient than it has been to date.

As Pessina said at the meeting, there is much to be done. All the personnel pieces are not yet in place. More executives from Alliance Boots will come to Chicago. More Americans will move to Europe. New faces will surely replace old ones. Gradually, Pessina, the principal architect of this merger, will resume his role as chief strategist of the new organization, dictating the moves and the timetable of events.

But make no mistake. Walgreens Boots Alliance is on the verge of remaking the global health care community, making it more efficient, more accessible and more affordable than it has ever been. Walgreens’ role in that restructure will be significant, but it will not noticeably affect the Walgreens drug store, other than to make it more efficient, and more accessible to the health care consumer. If, along the way, the company’s senior managers tinker with the mix or the adjacencies, if some product categories are given less emphasis while others get more, if pharmacy becomes increasingly critical, if the stores get larger or smaller, this is all part of a bigger picture, one that, the Walgreens leadership believe, will ultimately benefit the U.S., and the global, health care consumer.

Viewed this way, and indeed this is the only way to view this merger, the Walgreens Boots Alliance partnership is arguably the most significant in the annals of chain drug retailing in America, simply because it has the potential of influencing drug store retailing and wholesaling throughout the world.