Kimberly Jackson-Miller, a resident of Chicago’s Burnside neighborhood, has been a customer of the Walmart in Chatham since it opened more than a decade ago.
The Chatham Walmart Supercenter, along with three of the company’s Neighborhood Markets — in Grand Boulevard, Little Village and Lakeview — will close Sunday, a decision Walmart announced on Tuesday.
Walmart cited the stores’ unprofitability for its decision to close them, saying they lose “tens of millions of dollars a year” and that their yearly losses “nearly doubled in just the last five years.”
Jackson-Miller has diabetes and relies on insulin, which she takes twice a day. Walmart is her pharmacy of choice.
“This is the best pharmacy I’ve ever had my medication sent to,” she said in the parking lot outside the Supercenter Thursday. “So it’s hard for me to adjust for them closing it down.”
This will be the second time Jackson-Miller will have had to move her medications over the last several years, she said. The first time was during the civil unrest of the summer of 2020, when Walmart closed the Chatham store along with other Chicago locations. Many other pharmacies, like some local CVS and Walgreens locations, were also closed at the time, causing many Chicagoans, especially those living on the city’s South Side, to scramble for access to their medication.
“Mail order was confusing — it was too expensive,” Jackson-Miller said. “Then I tried CVS. It was too expensive. Then I tried Walgreens. It was too expensive. Walmart is the cheapest,” she said.
Walmart said the pharmacies at the stores it is closing will remain open for “up to” 30 days after the closures. Felicia McCranie, a spokesperson for the company, said Walmart’s “intent” was to keep the pharmacies open that long.
In addition to its pharmacy, the Chatham Walmart had a health clinic, where neighborhood residents with and without insurance could access affordable services like primary care and dental care.
Walmart opened the health clinic and another in the Austin neighborhood when both stores reopened in late 2020; the Chatham clinic is now slated to close by Sunday. In 2020, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said the company was committed to staying in Chicago even though “these stores, in many cases, are not profitable.”
Now, advocates and experts are concerned that the closure of four Walmart pharmacies and the Chatham health center will make it harder for people to access medications and health care in neighborhoods that have long struggled with disinvestment and where many residents don’t have access to reliable transportation.
The same neighborhoods have dealt with the at-times abrupt departures of grocery stores, now including Walmart.
Nedra Sims Fears, executive director of the Greater Chatham Initiative, said the closure of the health center at the neighborhood Walmart would be a significant loss for the neighborhood. She described Walmart’s health platform as “very user-friendly and accessible,” as opposed to clinics that may be more difficult navigate, especially for people without insurance.
Ald. Howard Brookins Jr., 21st, said there are other health care facilities within a mile or a mile-and-a-half or so of the Walmart, but that Walmart was particularly transparent about pricing. Still, he said, he suspected the health care center lacked some level of visibility in the community.
“A lot of the people in the community still did not necessarily know that they were there,” he said.
An adult checkup at the Chatham health center cost $90 and a dental cleaning cost $50; residents could receive two X-rays for as little as $40. Walmart notes that prices vary for patients paying with insurance, depending on their copays. Prices are the same at the company’s Austin location.
“As a city we need to be really careful about who our corporate partners are, and that are they in it for the long haul,” Fears said.
Dima Qato, an associate professor at the Alfred E. Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Southern California who has studied pharmacy access in Chicago, said pharmacy closures have become more common over the last several years.
“When they close, they’re more likely to close in low-income neighborhoods and Black and Latinx neighborhoods,” Qato said.
The closures will make it harder for Chicago to reduce health disparities, Qato said.
“That’s going to be hard to fulfill and achieve if we’re making it harder for people to access primary care and pharmacy services and to fill their medications on time, especially in minority communities,” she said.
A health care provider at the Chatham health center will remain on-call for refills and medical questions for a month after the store closes, Walmart said. Patients can choose to transfer to the clinic in Austin, which is at one of the Chicago stores slated to stay open.
“Providers and Walmart Health associates will work with patients to obtain or transfer their health records so they can continue their care with another provider of their choice. All medical records will be available for free for one year,” the company said.
In its statement announcing the store closures, Walmart cited the health center as an example of an investment it made to try and turn the store’s performance around.
“It was hoped that these investments would help improve our stores’ performance. Unfortunately, these efforts have not materially improved the fundamental business challenges our stores are facing,” the company wrote. McCranie declined to share information about how many people the Austin and Chatham health centers served.
Walmart’s four other city stores, in Austin, Pullman, Auburn Gresham and Belmont Cragin, all have pharmacies and will remain open, though the company said they “continue to face the same business difficulties” as the stores slated for closure. The company announced the closure of three suburban locations in February.
The city stores and pharmacies slated to close Sunday are located at 8431 S. Stewart Ave., 4720 S. Cottage Grove Ave., 2844 N. Broadway and 2551 W. Cermak Road.
Walmart did not directly receive financial incentives from the city to open those four stores, said Department of Planning and Development deputy commissioner Peter Strazzabosco.
The Walmart Neighborhood Market in Grand Boulevard was, however, the anchor tenant of a heavily subsidized project called the Shops and Lofts at 47, which opened in 2014 and received incentives including $13 million in Tax Increment Financing assistance, a $7.8 million loan from the Chicago Housing Authority, $8.4 million in low-income housing tax equity and $20 million in tax-exempt bonds.
“Walmart received no direct financial assistance,” Strazzabosco wrote in an email to the Tribune.
On the Thursday before the Supercenter’s closure, Chatham residents and others who had come from across the city’s South Side packed the store and its parking lot. Some were looking for deals on marked-down products; others had come to do one last grocery run. Almost all of the shoppers who spoke with the Tribune said the store was usually crowded, just like it was that afternoon.
“I knew that if I was going to that Walmart to expect a line,” alderman-elect Ronnie Mosley, who will soon represent the 21st ward in City Council, told the Tribune.
Some shoppers expressed skepticism that Walmart was really losing money at the location. Earlier in the day, a coalition had held a protest at the store, asking for it to stay open. A similar protest was planned in Little Village on Friday.
Kristian Armendariz, a community organizer with the Little Village Community Council, said he had spoken with a couple who live near the Walmart there and relied on its pharmacy for their diabetes medication.
“Since it’s closing, they had to switch their pharmacy, their prescriber. That’s been a hassle for them,” Armendariz said. Many residents, he said, are not yet aware that the Walmart is closing.
Little Village lost another pharmacy despite a community protest, a CVS, last June. There is a Walgreens and a Mexicare Pharmacy on 26th Street.
“Those pharmacies cannot beat Walmart’s prices,” Armendariz said. “That is why our senior citizens mainly go to Walmart for their medication.”
In a statement in response to community concerns about health care and pharmacy access, Walmart said the company was “grateful to our associates for their contributions to their communities and for the customers who have given us the privilege of serving them at these Chicago locations.”
McCranie said the company could not yet provide more information about the future of the Chatham property, which Walmart owns. It leases the space for the three closing Neighborhood Markets, she said.
Walmart has said it intends to donate its Walmart Academy training center to the Chatham community, though it has not provided more information about to whom it would donate it to.
“The ideal is that everything that is there that has been serving a need is replaced,” said Mosley, the incoming alderman, about the future of the Chatham property. “So still a pharmacy, still a health clinic, still a grocery store, still a general store, still workforce development.”
