Walgreens plans to close its drug store at 2104 McCallie Ave. before the end of the month, leaving the Glenwood, Highland Park and East Chattanooga areas near Chattanooga's biggest hospitals without a free-standing drug store in their neighborhoods.
In signs posted at the entrance to the store at the corner of McCallie Avenue and South Willow Street, Walgreens said it will close the 15-year-old drug store Feb. 27 but continue to operate nine other drug stores elsewhere in Hamilton County.
According to Hamilton County property records, the 14,431-square-foot store, just a couple of blocks from Parkridge Medical Center, opened as a Rite Aid drug store in 2009. The drug store has operated as a Walgreens outlet since the Walgreens Boots Alliance acquired 2,186 Rite Aid locations in 2017 and rebranded the McCallie Avenue store.
In a statement issued Friday by the Deerfield, Illinois-based drug store chain, Walgreens said store closings like the one in Chattanooga are due to multiple reasons and the company seeks to ensure customers can still get their prescriptions easily filled at other nearby Walgreens locations.
"When faced with the difficult decision to close a location, several factors are taken into account, including our existing footprint of stores, dynamics of the local market and changes in the buying habits of our patients and customers, among other reasons," Samantha Stansberry, manager of media relations for Walgreens, said in an email Friday. "Patients with prescriptions at this location (on McCallie Avenue) do not need to take any action. Their prescriptions will automatically transfer to the Walgreens at 3605 Brainerd Road in Chattanooga."
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The store closing comes less than two years after a mass shooting near the McCallie Avenue drug store left three dead and 17 people injured from gunfire and fleeing vehicles.
Staff Photo by Robin Rudd / A makeshift memorial sits at the base of a street sign outside Mary's Bar & Grill at 2125 McCallie Ave. in 2022 after three people were killed and 14 others wounded and injured after a shooting. The site is across the street from the Walgreens drug store that is scheduled to close Feb. 27.Walgreens has complained in the past about "rampant theft" and other criminal activity affecting some of its stores. The retail chain announced in 2019 it would close 200 of its stores across the nation to focus on its remaining nearby locations.
"We believe this is the right thing to do as it means that we can invest more in staffing those stores while not reducing our 90% coverage within a 10-minute drive of a (Walgreens) Boots," Sebastian James, a managing director at Walgreens Boots, said at the time. "We do not anticipate a significant effect from this activity to colleagues as we will redeploy the overwhelming majority to neighboring stores."
But Chattanooga City Council Member Marvene Noel, whose District 8 includes the McCallie Avenue Walgreens, said she is concerned that residents, workers and other businesses will be hurt by the store closing.
"It's going to be a hard hit for our neighborhood," Noel said in a telephone interview Friday. "Anytime you have a drug store that is going to close in your district, you worry about the more limited access to essential medications that many people need and the inconvenience and hardship for people having to go elsewhere to get their medicines and products. And you also have to think about the job losses that come from this closing."
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On a national level, U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., has criticized Walgreens for closing stores in low-income and racial minority communities. In a speech on the floor of the U.S. House on Tuesday, Pressley accused Walgreens of unfairly targeting low-income communities with store closings like the shutdown Wednesday of a drug store in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
Pressley and U.S. Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., sent a letter to Walgreens last month appealing to the drug store chain not to close the Roxbury store.
'This closure is a part of a larger trend of abandoning low-income communities," she said in her congressional speech this week. "When a Walgreens leaves a neighborhood, they disrupt the entire community and they take with them baby formula, diapers, asthma inhalers, life-saving medications, and, of course, jobs. These closures are not arbitrary, and they are not innocent. They are life-threatening acts of racial and economic discrimination."
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6340.
Staff Photo by Dave Flessner / Signs posted Friday at the entrance to the Walgreens drug store on McCallie Avenue tell about the planned closing of the store Feb. 27.