The Rite Remedy

By Daniel Eisenberg

Sales at Rite Aid are up a healthy 9%, and most of its nearly 4,000 locations are jammed with customers in search of a cure for everything from pimples to arthritis. So why are Wall Street wags calling it Wrong Aid?

While rivals like CVS and Walgreens are enjoying record profits, the nation's second largest drugstore chain is saddled with billions of dollars in debt and caught in the crosshairs of an SEC investigation into its questionable accounting practices. For months the bad news has been relentless: In mid-October the board forced out CEO Martin Grass and announced that pretax profits for the past three years would be revised downward by $500 million. Then just before Thanksgiving, the chain's longtime auditor, KPMG, bolted after refusing to re-examine its client's books. Says Edward Comeau, an analyst at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette: "This was a house of cards that just collapsed."

Now it's Robert G. Miller's job to rebuild it. Named Rite Aid chairman and CEO last week, Miller, 55, comes from the No. 2 job at Kroger, the nation's grocery powerhouse. To heal the drugstore giant, he'll have to regain confidence on Main Street and Wall Street: Rite Aid has been the biggest loser in the S&P 500 this year, with an 80% drop in its shares since January.

Miller, who transformed regional grocer Fred Meyer into a supermarket behemoth before it was sold to Kroger earlier this year, knows fixing Rite Aid will be an uphill battle, so he's bringing three top lieutenants to help him. "Bob really cares about the customer, and that wasn't always an attitude that pervaded Rite Aid," says Meredith Adler, analyst at Lehman Bros. "He's a talented manager and a real straight shooter."

Still, Miller inherits a case study in the perils of trying too hard to please today's growth-hungry stock market. As the drugstore industry has consolidated into a few dominant national chains, Martin Grass (son of Rite Aid founder Alex Grass) nearly doubled the number of outlets, buying independents and refashioning smaller locations into 10,000-sq.-ft. convenience stores. That kind of real estate doesn't come cheap. In 1996, Grass shelled out $1.4 billion for a thousand Thrifty PayLess drugstores on the West Coast. Then a year ago, he spent $1.5 billion on PCS Health Systems, a pharmacy-benefit manager that oversees employees' prescription coverage. Even Miller, whose retailing career began in high school as a bottle sorter for a California grocer, admits, "I wouldn't have been able to manage all that."

Though he'll continue to modernize older stores, Miller says he'll significantly slow the frenetic pace of expansion and cut back the company's costly advertising blitz. Rite Aid has rescheduled $2.7 billion of its debt, and before long, it should announce a deal to sell PCS. As for the underperforming, oversize stores on the West Coast, Miller insists he will rejuvenate, not unload them. Wall Street announced a measure of approval: Rite Aid stock closed at $11.50, up about $3 for the week. And with baby boomers and senior citizens fueling a boom in prescription drugs, Miller is confident he can cure Rite Aid's ills: "This is the fastest growing sector in retail." Now if he can just impose some financial discipline, he might be able to keep pace with it.