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Re:

Walgreens Shut Down drugstore.com in 2016, Five Years After Its $429M Acquisition

Walgreens completed its drugstore.com acquisition on June 3, 2011 and shut down drugstore.com and Beauty.com on September 30, 2016, five years, three months and 27 days later. The $429 million headline is equity value; enterprise value was about $409 million.
From TheFinanceBase Team3 min to read
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Walgreens shut down drugstore.com and Beauty.com on September 30, 2016. That was five years, three months and 27 days after Walgreens completed the acquisition on June 3, 2011, so the “4 years after” framing in the headline does not match the dates. The $429 million figure is the equity value of the deal. Walgreens separately reported an enterprise value of about $409 million.

Key dates, from deal announcement to shutdown

The sequence is easy to misread because the announcement, the completion and the shutdown fall on three different dates. The table below lists each one and measures the gap from completion, since that is the date the acquisition became Walgreens’ to run.

Event Date What the source says Time after completion
Merger agreement announced March 24, 2011 Walgreens and drugstore.com announced a definitive agreement at $3.80 cash per share Not applicable (before completion)
Acquisition completed June 3, 2011 Walgreens announced completion; the release described the deal as about $409 million enterprise value Starting point
Websites shut down September 30, 2016 Walgreens’ customer-support page states that drugstore.com and Beauty.com officially shut down on this date 5 years, 3 months, 27 days

Measured from the March 2011 announcement instead, the shutdown came about five years and six months later. Measured from completion, which is the usual reference point for “years after a purchase,” the gap is just under five years and four months. Neither calculation yields four years.

Why the deal was reported as $429 million and $409 million

Both numbers appear in Walgreens’ own announcements, and they describe different things.

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  • Equity value, about $429 million. This is what shareholders were paid: $3.80 in cash for each share of drugstore.com. It is the figure in most headlines.
  • Enterprise value, about $409 million. This is the value of the business itself, which Walgreens reported both at signing and at completion. Enterprise value is generally calculated as equity value plus debt, minus cash. Because the enterprise value sits about $20 million below the equity value, drugstore.com held more cash than debt at the time, and the net figure reduces the price of the business.

Neither number is an independent market statistic. Both are the terms Walgreens set out for this transaction, and both are dated to 2011.

What Walgreens said it was buying

The March 2011 rationale

At announcement, Walgreens described the deal as a way to speed up its online and multichannel strategy. The company pointed to drugstore.com’s existing online customer base, its vendor relationships, its e-commerce capabilities, and its assortment in health, personal care, beauty and vision. Walgreens described the online portfolio as roughly 60,000 non-prescription products. These were the company’s stated reasons at the time. They were not evidence that the benefits were later realized.

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The June 2011 completion plan

When the deal closed, Walgreens said the websites would keep their separate brands. It said it intended, over the long term, to integrate the businesses and use the sites to broaden its multichannel product range and improve the customer experience. That is a description of plans. The sources do not establish how far those plans went before the sites closed.

Why the sites closed: what is and is not established

The shutdown date is documented in Walgreens’ customer-support content, which describes drugstore.com and Beauty.com as officially shut down on September 30, 2016. That statement is retrospective. It confirms when the sites closed, but it does not explain why.

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No contemporaneous 2016 Walgreens statement giving a reason for the closure was located for this article. Any explanation of the decision, such as a strategic shift, a change in how the company sold online, or a performance judgment, would be speculation until Walgreens or its filings address it directly. Readers who need the reason should look for the company’s 2016 announcements and quarterly disclosures from that period.

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How to check a “years after” claim

Headlines about how long a business lasted under new ownership often mix up dates. A quick check helps:

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  1. Find the completion date, not the announcement date. Completion is when the buyer took control.
  2. Find the shutdown or closure date from the company’s own statement, and note whether the source is contemporaneous or retrospective.
  3. Subtract the completion date from the closure date, counting years, months and days.
  4. Check which price figure a headline uses. Equity value is the amount paid to shareholders, while enterprise value includes debt and cash.

Applied to drugstore.com, these steps give five years, three months and 27 days from completion to shutdown, and a $429 million equity value alongside a $409 million enterprise value.

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Frequently confused points

  • The shutdown is a past event. The headline’s “to shut down” wording describes something that happened in September 2016.
  • The $429 million figure does not reflect the total cost to Walgreens after closing, operating or integrating the business. The sources reviewed do not report those figures.
  • Beauty.com is named alongside drugstore.com in Walgreens’ shutdown statement, so the 2016 closure covered both sites.

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