Wednesday, February 5, 2014

GOOFY: CVS to Stop Selling Cigarettes

This is one of the goofiest things I have ever heard of coming out of corporate America. A fat man has decided it is bad to sell cigarettes. I wonder if Larry Merlo (pictured below) would get a kick out of grocery stores refusing to sell him Twinkies.


Of course, any business in a free market can certainly operate anyway they choose. Chick-Fil-A. for example, on religious reasons does not open on Sunday's, which is fine with me, but the CVS move smacks of major league political correctness from a firm that seems to be much too close to the government.

In testimony before Congress, Merlo boasted:
We are the second largest provider of drug benefits to eligible beneficiaries under the Federal Government’s Medicare Part D program. Each year, CVS pharmacists serve more than 6 million beneficiaries and fill more than 245 million prescriptions under the Part D program. 
The political correctness just doesn't stop with this guy. DiversityInc reports:
“We value diversity and share a common belief in the importance of revitalizing local communities and creating a more diverse workforce,” Merlo said when the company sponsored the National Urban League Conference in 2011. “We are exploring a deeper partnership with the Urban League that will leverage their grassroots reach into multicultural communities with the goal of helping people build prosperous careers.”
The company plans to phase out all tobacco sales by Oct. 1 and  expects it could lose about $2 billion in annual revenue generated by tobacco sales and other products purchased by the same shoppers. The pharmacy chain generates about $125 billion in revenue annually.

It's a puritanical move, which H.L. Mencken understood very well:
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy

8 comments:

  1. It'll be interesting to see how this affects CVS's bottom line. Allow the customer to make the decision I say.

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  2. "I wonder if Larry Merlo (pictured below) would get a kick out of grocery stores refusing to sell him Twinkies."

    CVS sells their own Twinkies. He'll be just fine, lol.

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    1. If he's so concerned about peoples' health, he should change all of CVS into a chain of health-food stores.

      Goofy is right.

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  3. God I hate sanctimonious asshats.

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  4. Time to sell CVS stock.

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  5. Rite Aid just rubbed their hands together with joy

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  6. Do the chief executives of CVS have any idea what kind of products they sell? Did they all just crawl out of caves? They want people to be healthy so they are going to quit selling cigarettes –really? How about the fact that approximately a third of the store is composed of seasonal candy, and the president makes claims that he is concerned about the effect smoking has on diabetes –seriously? How about the massive foot traffic coming into CVS to purchase the alcohol they sell to their many customers, is CVS concerned about that? How about the fact that prescription drugs kill over 100,000 people each year; will they be getting out of the prescription drug business next? How about the lotto machine in many of their stores, that can’t be good for people’s gambling addictions? How about the MoneyGram they have in their stores so poor people can get money wired to them in the store to support their CVS habits. The whole company is design to cater to this type of clientele. Maybe the president and staff used to dream of working in a medical office and ended up working for CVS instead. CVS is not a medical facility, yet they talk about CVS as if it is. They sell prescriptions, a far cry from a health care facility. Don’t they realize that if all their customers were healthy they would not need a CVS in the first place; this is a truly self-defeating proposition for CVS. I’ve seen other companies sow the seed of their own demise and I suggest CVS appears to be doing the same.

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  7. Now if we could just get Larry to stop eating Big Macs.

    [Yeah, I know...]

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