Walgreens Minimum Hourly Wage To Increase to $15 in October

Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. announced on September 1 that, starting from October, it will raise the minimum wages for all its employees to $15 an hour.
The pharmacy store chain’s move aimed at retaining and luring more people to work after the COVID-19 outbreak is just one more in a series of similar announcements from other US drugstores. Rival CVS Health announced it would increase the minimum wage to the same amount earlier, but the implementation will not start before July next year. With the nationwide labor shortage brought on by the pandemic, many other companies announced raising wages, including Walmart and Chipotle.
“Investing in and rewarding our team members is not only the right thing to do; it’s highly important to retaining and attracting a talented workforce,” said Chief Executive Officer Roz Brewer.
Currently, about half of Walgreens’s 190,000 employees are already earning $15 an hour, but the starting wage stands at $10. Walgreens will invest nearly $450 million in the wage increase in the course of the next three years. One-third of the amount will be invested in fiscal 2022.
Walgreens, CVS, Kroger, and Walmart will likely also play a key role in administering booster shots of COVID-19 vaccines. These booster shots are currently available solely to the immunocompromised. Still, if US health regulators give it the green light, the booster dose will likely be available to anyone starting September 20.
President of Kroger Health Colleen Lindholz said in an interview that dedicated workers providing vaccinations would be working in about a hundred of Kroger’s US locations.
Meanwhile, wearing masks, maintaining social distance, and using debit and credit cards for payments instead of cash are still recommended in pharmacies and other stores, even for fully vaccinated Americans.
Julia A. is a writer at SmallBizGenius.net. With experience in both finance and marketing industries, she enjoys staying up to date with the current economic affairs and writing opinion pieces on the state of small businesses in America. As an avid reader, she spends most of her time poring over history books, fantasy novels, and old classics. Tech, finance, and marketing are her passions, and she’s a frequent contributor at various small business blogs.
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