Boston Days - Part 7

Is CVS a Pharmacy? A Toy Store? A Convenience Store? Yes.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers the “Positioning” of a Retailer) 

After pondering for several minutes, reading the name printed on every miniature car, I picked up three — all American icons.

A Ford, a Chevrolet, and a DHL pickup truck that has moved American commerce and economy since 1969. Three satisfying finds.

I placed them on the counter and looked up. The backlit signage above the cashier read: CVS Pharmacy. I had just spent ten unhurried minutes choosing toy cars inside a pharmacy.

What exactly is this place? Pharmacy, convenience store, seasonal gift shop, beauty destination, or a toy aisle with a dispensing counter? Walking through CVS, the answer changes with every aisle.

CVS was born in 1963 as Consumer Value Stores in Lowell, Massachusetts. Today it operates roughly 9,000 stores across the United States, present in 3,486 cities nationwide.

Applying a Pareto lens, New York leads with 183 stores. Houston follows with 119, Los Angeles 105, Chicago 73, Philadelphia 63. Dense urban concentration — by strategy, not accident.

Each store typically occupies around 4,000 square feet in dense urban neighbourhoods. Large enough to carry pharmacy, merchandise, beauty, food, seasonal gifting, and apparently, a very respectable toy section.

For readers in India, here is essential context. Most Americans pay little or nothing at the pharmacy counter — their health insurance, managed by intermediaries called PBMs, pays instead.

PBM stands for Pharmacy Benefit Manager — a powerful third party sitting between insurer, drug manufacturer, and pharmacy. It determines exactly how much the pharmacy gets reimbursed for every prescription dispensed.

Reimbursement rates have fallen relentlessly for over a decade. CVS’s pharmacy segment operating margin compressed from 9.9% in 2015 to just 3.5% today, on revenues of $139.4 billion. The arithmetic is punishing.

Walgreens, CVS’s closest comparable, ran a negative 5% operating margin on US pharmacy retail before being taken private by Sycamore Partners in 2025. The industry’s economics are structurally broken.

Which brings us back to the toy cars. The prescription customer walks in, hands over their insurance card, pays a nominal copay or sometimes nothing at all, and waits.

CVS needs that customer to also pick up candy, a greeting card, or three miniature diecast cars. Front store margins are meaningfully better than anything earned from a reimbursed prescription.

The business model, stripped to its core, is converting compulsory prescription footfall into discretionary front-store revenue. It is not irrational thinking. It is, in fact, survival thinking.

Except the consumer has not fully cooperated. CVS’s front store same-store sales declined 2.1% in 2024, recovering to just 1.2% in 2025. Customers tolerate the format. They do not embrace it.

The result is a retail identity no shopper can define in one sentence. A pharmacy barely profiting from prescriptions it fills, surrounded by merchandise it hopes will subsidise the enterprise.

The DHL truck, the Ford and the Chevrolet sit on my desk here in Boston. Charming mementos of a pharmacy still searching, with some urgency, for its own positioning clarity.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.) 

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9 here.

Boston Days - Part 6

The Cleaning Liquid I Couldn’t Find. And What It Said About the World’s Most Advanced Retail Market.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers the “Indian Quick Commerce boom”)

It started with a dirty iPad keyboard.

Three weeks of intensive sessions, constant note-taking, and the kind of daily use that leaves a screen looking like it has lived a full life. I needed a cleaning liquid. A simple, everyday SKU. The kind of thing that sits on a shelf in any electronics accessories aisle back home.

I walked into the nearest neighbourhood store. The staff looked at me the way you look at someone asking for something that simply does not exist in their world.

I tried another. Same result.

I turned, predictably, to Amazon. Thursday delivery. This was Monday. Prime or no Prime, apparently, does not always mean fast.

And that is when it hit me — not as a grievance, but as a genuine retail observation.

I am sitting in the city that gave the world MIT, Harvard, the internet, and more patents than most countries have produced in their entire history. And I cannot get a bottle of screen cleaner delivered to my door before the week is out.

Back in Chennai, I would have opened Zepto. Nine minutes. Done.

That contrast stayed with me longer than it should have, because it is not actually a logistics story. It is a structural one.

India’s quick commerce — Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart — was never designed in a boardroom as a solution to affluence. 

It was built to solve a very Indian problem: the gap between what modern consumers needed and what traditional retail could deliver. Dark stores, hyperlocal networks, mobile-first consumers, and a density of demand in our cities did the rest.

America’s retail architecture was built around a different model entirely. Large-format stores. Vast parking lots. The weekly family grocery run. A suburban rhythm of shopping that was never designed for impulse or urgency at the last mile.

The demand density that makes a dark store economically viable simply does not exist the same way in Boston’s residential neighbourhoods. Labour costs and real estate economics add further complexity. 

And so, despite GoPuff and DoorDash Dash Mart and Instacart’s best efforts, quick commerce here remains fragmented, expensive, and largely confined to dense urban pockets.

Amazon is trying. Walmart GoLocal is trying. The intent is visible. The execution, at scale, is still some distance away.

I eventually found a workaround, as one always does. But the question stayed with me through the rest of the day.

India built quick commerce out of necessity. And in doing so, leapfrogged the very markets that once set the global retail agenda.

That is a sentence I would not have expected to write ten years ago. I find that I mean it rather completely.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9 here.

Boston Days - Part 5

Merchandise, Memories and Monetising Legacy

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers the “Merchandising opportunity in India”)

I wasn’t expecting a retail moment inside a Harvard Business School campus. But that’s the thing about retail — it finds you.

The COOP, run jointly by the MIT and Harvard communities, sits unobtrusively within the HBS campus. I almost walked past it. I’m glad I didn’t.

What struck me first was the depth. Not just the range of merchandise, but the depth within each category. Sizes, colours, variants — all available. Not just displayed. Actually in stock. 

Anyone who has spent years in Indian retail will know exactly why that distinction matters. Range is easy to claim. Availability is harder to deliver.

I moved through each section the way I always do in a retail format that has something to say — slowly, observantly. 

The pricing was nominal — deliberately so. This store isn’t trying to extract maximum value from a captive audience. It is serving a community. That restraint speaks to a retail philosophy I find increasingly rare, and quietly admirable.

The staff were warm and unhurried. Not trained-smile warm. Actually warm.

Before visiting, I had already browsed thecoop.com — same range, same brand identity, consistent experience across channels. I was quietly impressed. 

Right until I noticed there was no click-and-collect option for online orders. No store pick-up. In 2026. From an institution that has arguably shaped modern management thinking worldwide. I had to smile.

But that gap aside, the COOP does something far more important than sell merchandise. It monetises legacy. 

Harvard and MIT merchandise carries an aspirational weight that no marketing budget can manufacture. 

People don’t just buy a mug or a hoodie. They buy belonging. They buy aspiration. They buy a story they want to be part of.

And that’s when my mind travelled back home.

India’s IITs and IIMs command exactly that kind of emotional currency. I have met people across the country — and across the world — for whom an IIT or IIM connection is a life-defining identity. 

Alumni who wear that association with quiet, deep pride. Aspirants who dream of it. Parents who speak of it with reverence.

That is not just brand equity. That is retail gold.

And yet, what exists on the ground? 

IIM Indore has Merchand-I — sincere and meaningful, but modest in scale. IIT Madras runs a campus gift shop online. CampusMall powers online stores across several institutions. 

Third-party aggregators sell branded apparel without institutional ownership, campus presence or meaningful curation.

None of it adds up to a retail strategy.

If I were to seriously consider a start-up opportunity when I return to India, this would be the first one I’d put on the table. 

The market is real, the aspiration is built, and the white space is hiding in plain sight.

The COOP didn’t happen by accident. 

It is the result of a community deciding that its brand deserved a serious, well-executed retail expression. Someone needs to make that case to India’s premier institutions.

The brand is already built. The store is simply waiting to open.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9 here.