Pharmacy closures in 2025 reshaped where people buy health products
Since women’s health care company Winx Health made its national retail debut at Walgreens this September, roughly 10% of its sales haven’t happened in-store — they’ve come from DoorDash.
Winx took on its first national retail partner as it started to push the limits of direct-to-consumer growth, co-founder Jamie Norwood said. But that doesn’t mean the brand has abandoned its online-first approach or its use of delivery platforms to drive awareness and sales.
“People aren’t going to stop going to Walmart or Walgreens, but I think consumers will shop differently,” Norwood said. “There’s a ton of demand among people who want to be healthy and take care of themselves. And we don’t necessarily have one dedicated place for it.”
Winx’s omnichannel success at Walgreens underscores the broader disruption of the pharmacy sector in 2025. There are roughly 2,000 fewer pharmacy locations, to start: Around 1,250 Rite Aid’s locations closed after its Chapter 11; Walgreens shuttered around 500 locations, as part of its plans to close 1,200 in three years; and CVS closed 270 spots in 2025, on top of another 900 doors in recent years.
These closures exacerbated an existing access problem. Roughly one in seven people live in a pharmacy desert, per GoodRX, defined as requiring at least a 15-minute drive to get to a pharmacy.
In turn, much of the pharmacy business is getting picked up by online delivery platforms, marketplaces, grocery and convenience stores. Retailers are increasingly investing more in their pharmacy business — Sam’s Club, for instance, launched free same-day prescription delivery, Walmart can deliver refrigerated GLP-1 drugs, and Giant Eagle took on pharmacy business from 78 Rite Aid locations.
Winx’s Norwood said the company wanted to pursue a national retail launch after hitting a ceiling on direct-to-consumer reach. Prior retail launches included regional grocery chains, but given that around 75% of the U.S. population lives within five miles of a Walgreens, Norwood said the launch meant the company could sell pregnancy tests, UTI test kits and more to women on a bigger scale.
The company also designed sidecaps and in-line shelving to help the product stand out to in-person shoppers, aware that a major segment of the population still physically shops for health products the moment they need them. But it also put marketing dollars behind DoorDash to help promote the Walgreens launch.
“People are demanding these better experiences,” Norwood said. “If we can order our food on our phones and get everything on Amazon, we should be able to go to the pharmacy and get treatment easily.”
Disruption patterns
Barry Thomas, senior thought leader at Kantar, said part of reason the “corner drug store” is going away is because prescriptions have moved from counter to doorsteps. Federal and private health insurer data show a range of numbers, but most estimates put the number of people who get prescriptions through the mail somewhere between 10% and 15%. One United Health Care data point says around 12% of maintenance medications are fulfilled by the mail.
“What’s happened with online orders and home delivery is unprecedented,” Thomas said. “It’s so much easier, and convenience has been redefined. Pharmacies were last to [adopt] delivery, and that’s a big part of it.”
More recently, he said, the rise of GLP-1 drugs is a missed opportunity for brick-and-mortar pharmacies. “They’re at the epicenter of what’s happening with GLP-1 drugs and weight loss,” he said.
Amar Singh, senior director of consulting at Kantar, said part of the disruption was caused by a collapse of the convenience aspect of drug stores. Shoppers who are spending more time at Walmart or Amazon are buying their health and wellness products there, as well as at grocery stores and in dollar channels. This means less of a margin for the chains that relied on not just people picking up prescriptions, but also those making quick trips for convenience items, Singh said.
“There has been a real fragmentation of this channel into other areas and a dilution of those categories to other players,” he said.
The pharmacy closures have had a ripple effect across the communities they served. Ryan Ash, vp of development and leasing at the real estate firm Vestar, said joint pharmacy-convenience stores were once a supplemental anchor to grocery in some larger properties.
“From a landlord’s perspective, it’s almost always better to keep our long-term tenants. And I think convenience stores do have a future. However, I think that industry is just in flux,” he said.
In other instances, it can be a boon to get the property back to lease it out, given that some pharmacies may have been locked into decades-long leases. Ash said Vestar didn’t have too many Rite Aid closures in its portfolio, but in some cases, it ended up benefiting other tenants thanks to the prescription business being transferred to their stores. One closed property transferred its pharmacy business to a grocery store.
“Now, that grocer is going to be capturing those sales, which further cements the profitability and the success of that grocer,” he said.
What it means for brands
Samantha Miller, founder and CEO of women’s health brand Cadence OTC, has also seen a shift in people buying outside of traditional pharmacies. Her company sells emergency contraception pills for under $30 and has a brick-and-mortar presence of around 20,000 stores. It intentionally began selling at convenience stores in 2024, at places like Circle K and Speedway, with distribution from Lil’ Drug Store Products, to address pharmacy deserts. “The pharmacy stores tend to be in highly populated, higher income areas, and that’s becoming more true where the whole pharmacy industry is shrinking,” she said.
Most recently, Cadence launched in Kroger stores, and it forecasts doubling sales in 2025 with plans to double again next year.
Miller also sees many customers using delivery, which Miller credits to the immediacy of the product’s demand. “The sooner you take it, the better chance of stopping that fertilization. And so, brick-and-mortar pharmacies being inconvenient is really a big problem, and it also tends to be a big problem for the people that need it most, because these are areas that don’t always have good healthcare access.”
Cadence started selling in 7-Eleven stores in the fall of 2024. But when the product became available on its DoorDash-powered delivery service 7Now in late 2025, it became one of the top-5-selling SKUs in the store, underscoring the power of digital. “That includes snacks, beer, everything. So that was remarkable,” Miller said.
But the delivery channel is still nascent, she said. Cadence sends product to around 140 DoorDash warehouses, as it sells directly on the platform. But Miller said the inventory system can be clunky; this fall, the product was selling out so quickly that she hired a part-time contractor from Upwork to help track inventory. Twice a week, the contractor checked how many of its products were still for sale on DoorDash and let Cadence know when to send more stock.
“Forecasting and inventory is the secret devil in the e-commerce world right now, when there are so many touch points,” she said.
Still, she sees the company pursuing more brick-and-mortar relationships, such as Walmart, to make emergency contraception as available as condoms.
“I do think this is an opportunity for perceptions to change and for retailers, [including] convenience stores, grocery stores and gas stations, to realize there’s an opportunity for having an OTC healthcare section in their store for urgent products,” she said. “And then, people will realize, ‘Wait, I can get those anywhere.'”