Boots Chemist has been sold

Boots has never belonged to Walmart.
It did belong to a different firm called Walgreen, hence the confusion.

It then belonged to a private equity firm Sycamore Partners.

I posted this on the other thread:

The Weston family has strong links with the UK, notably Cornwall. W Garfield Weston was an MP for Macclesfield during WW2 and the Garfield Weston Foundation supports many UK charities.

I hope that the fate of Boots is more hopeful now it not owned by a private equity firm.

MT62

It’s a shame our local boots is always dead. Really I don’t know how they keep going as they are so expensive.
We also have Superdrug almost next door which is always packed with youngsters.
I liked boots back in the day when Timothy Whites was attached.
I now tend to nip to homebargains on the outskirts of town & rarely go into our town centre due to horrendous parking (40 mins) no time to do anything really.

Our local Boots store was closed some two years ago, prior to this for about 18 months there was virtually nothing on the shelves and not enough staff, it went from being the chemist of choice for prescriptions, and for getting face creams etc to a ghost of a shop with zero service!

It’s a shame our local boots is always dead. Really I don’t know how they keep going as they are so expensive.
We also have Superdrug almost next door which is always packed with youngsters.
I liked boots back in the day when Timothy Whites was attached.
I now tend to nip to homebargains on the outskirts of town & rarely go into our town centre due to horrendous parking (40 mins) no time to do anything really.

At least in the short term this may be good news for staff working at Boots.

Margs

Another well-established retail icon hoovered up by another multi-national conglomerate.

Wonder how much debt will be loaded onto this once-respected name?

As it already belonged to the US company, Walmart, I'm not altogether sure what you are complaining about. It is many years since it was British owned.

If this Canadian company isn't a private equity (asset stripper) based one then there may indeed be hope for improvement.

OTOH, UK shoppers are so addicted to buying on line, mostly from Amazon, that I fear that nothing can really rescue a High Street name such as Boots.

Boots was actually merged into Walgreens, a completely different company to Walmart, which runs drugstores in the US, and last year a private equity company called Sycamore Partnership took over, and separated the two companies back out.

I think it’s a good move for Boots to be purchased by the Westons, they used to own Selfridges, and also own the Shoppers Drug Mart chain in Canada. Fingers crossed it works out well for Boots - I hope they improve their clunky website as a result.

Another well-established retail icon hoovered up by another multi-national conglomerate.

Wonder how much debt will be loaded onto this once-respected name?

Apologies for posting several times like that.

The business pages seem to think This is a great result for Boots and the staff. The Westons are serious business people not asset strippers - and it will be very interesting to see what they do with the acquisition.

Weston’s have more connections to Ireland than, I think they live there and they started of a company called Pennys there that morphed into Primark where they made a shedload of money, although they employ a lot of people I didn’t think they pay much tax. To be fair Boots was becoming a rubbish shop under Walmart ownership.