IRONWOOD, MI - Saturday, July 26, 2008 - The new Walgreens at 802 East Cloverland Drive opened its doors for the first time yesterday.  The new store is approximately13,650 square feet and has a drive-thru pharmacy window. Eventually, the store will keep a staff of about 25 employees on hand.

In addition to drive-thru service, the new Walgreens offers extensive pharmacy services, including a variety of options to refill medications. Touch-tone service allows a patient to enter their prescription number and request a time for a refill by touch-tone without having to speak directly to pharmacy staff. Patients may also arrange for automated refills and receive e-mail reminders of refill status.

The store features one-hour photo processing, passport photos and digital photo services. Customers can share photos with family and friends across the country when they upload digital pictures from their home computer for pick-up at any Walgreens nationwide.

The cosmetics department has full-time beauty advisors trained to help customers select cosmetics that are right for them.

The store manager is Steve Martins. Walgreens will be having a grand opening at a later date. The chain prefers to do "soft openings" to allow new employees a chance to learn the system before being bombarded with new customers. The company operates 6,271 drugstores in 49 states and Puerto Rico. New stores are soon to be constructed in Ashland and Superior, Wisconsin.

Ms. Carol Hively, Corporate Spokeswoman for Walgreens explained why the chain chose to build a store in Ironwood. She responded, "We've been growing very rapidly. We open a new store about every sixteen hours. So, what we are finding is that the demand for prescription drugs is increasing very dramatically. So, we're getting stores in place not only to meet the current demand, but also the growing future demand for prescriptions drugs. So what we're looking for in our research, we look at communities where we expect the demand for prescription drugs to increase. Maybe it's the age of the population or a growing population that attracts our interest. Or maybe there is a need for more pharmacy services in the community. It could be a number of things – if there is senior housing in an area or medical services – something that would create a demand for prescriptions to be filled."

"Our stores very typically have very extensive pharmacy services, so, what we would hope is that people who may not be familiar with Walgreens would be welcome, and come to our stores and see at the new store all the pharmacy services that it has to offer."

Jim Albert