By Jessica Wohl
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Walgreen Co's
Walgreen, whose shares rose 3 percent, said it had seen steady consumer traffic throughout December, with transactions in comparable stores up 0.7 percent.
Basic necessities sold well, Walgreen said, while demand for seasonal items was weak. Drugstores sell gifts, holiday decorations and cards, but those discretionary items did not sell as well as food, medicine and other basics.
Walgreen's same-store sales rose 4.9 percent in December after falling 0.9 percent in November. The results got a boost of 2 percentage points because December 2008 had two more weekdays -- when patients typically fill more prescriptions -- than December 2007 did.
Walgreen said pharmacy same-store sales jumped 8.5 percent. General merchandise, or front-end, same-store sales rose 0.4 percent.
Rite Aid's same-store sales fell 0.2 percent in the four weeks ended December 27. Pharmacy same-store sales rose 1.2 percent while front-end same-store sales fell 2.4 percent.
CVS Caremark Corp
However, after Walgreen posted a smaller-than-expected quarterly profit on December 22, CVS issued a statement standing by its full-year profit forecast. At that time, it said consumers were cautious and that it expected December same-store sales to be "well short" of their increases of 4.3 percent in October and 6.1 percent in November.
Both Walgreen and Rite Aid said pharmacy same-store sales had suffered because of the introduction of generic drugs over the past year. Generics cost less, leading to lower sales, but are generally more profitable for drugstores than their branded counterparts.
Walgreen said the number of prescriptions filled at comparable stores rose 6 percent, although that figure was hit by 1.6 percentage points as more patients filled 90-day instead of 30-day prescriptions.
Rite Aid, which posted its sixth straight quarterly loss in December, bought the Brooks and Eckerd drugstore chains in 2007. Same-store sales at those acquired stores fell 1.6 percent in the December period.
Walgreen, which is redesigning stores and scaling back the number of stores it plans to open, said total sales rose 10.8 percent to nearly $6.11 billion. Rite Aid's total drugstore sales fell 2.1 percent to $2.16 billion.
Walgreen had 6,636 stores as of December 31, while Rite Aid had 4,915 as of December 27.
Shares of Walgreen were up 76 cents at $26.31 in morning New York Stock Exchange trade, while Rite Aid gained 1 cent to 35 cents.
(Reporting by Jessica Wohl; Editing by Derek Caney and Lisa Von Ahn)
