Interesting news today about Eli Lilly and Pfizer having direct to consumers website where consumers can get certain medications at discounted prices. Both CVS and Walgreens getting hammered on the news. Cutting out the middle man is bad for CVS, since they ARE the middle man.
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Like any other brick and mortar business .
Cut cut cut until you can’t get blood from a rock .
Two biggest costs - payroll and utilities / rent
Guess which one goes first ?
Really is a turnabout is fair play scenario. CVS decided to hose over consumers by forcing them away from the choice of Humira in favor of their dubious quality self-owned biologic. Then CVS acts shocked that the Rx empires strike back. Hilariously, any pharmaceutical company that sells direct at this time is going to be able to do so much easier than years past as Aetna (owned by CVS) and other big insurers have insisted that consumers go mail order for nearly all chronic condition medicines. They’ve trained the masses for their replacement market holders.
The Dr-g Manufacturers despise CVS. Management at CVS asserts that they are innovators. They are not. Look at Costco. Costco started with a blank sheet of paper. They wanted to minimize shoplifting, bad checks, and they wanted to maximize sales for each parking spot. The answer was paid membership with a credit check. Now look at CVS. No planning. Stores everywhere. Items under lock and key. Maximal shoplifting. They are busy making workers reprice their cheap branded junk. That is why Karen is in the Layoff Business.
@2rhh+1udkoi6a You'd think. But then this is CVS we're talking about, so they'd just go "but what about our profit margins?"
It’s for cash pay for their obesity glp-1 meds. You’d think CVS would negotiate a reasonable price for cash pay through them for these high demand dr-gs.
Cvs is dead man walking, nobody has told Karen yet. Why do you think neither amazon or cuban or anyone else has shown interest in buying cvs outright? They know it's dead and will pick at the corpse.
IF the manufacturers manage to keep prices on the lower side, CVS won't be able to compete. Probably why CVS created this costvantage thing. But that won't do CVS any good if you can buy straight from the source instead, and at a lower price.
It’s a double whammy for CVS as it also cuts out Caremark in addition to the store. It’s interesting to see if this model expands broadly to other companies too. Next question, can they self police price hikes or greed lets them hike prices faster than inflation.