The report comes during a rough period for the retail pharmacy giant. Walgreens – squeezed by the transition out of the Covid pandemic, a leadership shakeup, pharmacy reimbursement pressure and its wobbly push into health-care – has underperformed Wall Street’s earnings expectations for two straight quarters. In October, Walgreens said it plans to close roughly 1,200 of its drugstores over the next three years, which includes 500 in fiscal 2025 alone. Walgreens has around 8,700 locations in the U.S., a quarter of which it says are unprofitable. Walgreens has reportedly been seen as a potential private equity target in the past. In 2019, private equity firm KKR made a roughly $70 billion buyout offer to the company, the Financial Times and Bloomberg reported at the time. This is breaking news.