> HN folks would easy criticize Walgreens for not innovating.

1. It's possible for one forum to have two distinct groups with different and contradictory opinions, where neither represents the whole.

2. While some may have wanted Walgreens to "innovate", it's implicit that they wanted good/smart changes and probably for customers, rather than a weirdly destroying functionality in order to serve in-store ads on extremely questionable hardware.

Embracing failure means to not be afraid of the possibility of failure. It does not mean to seek out and execute failures on purpose.

"Let's spend a bunch of money to make our stores harder to use" is not an innovation deserving of praise.

I understand what you’re getting at. Walgreens is a very old fashioned and frankly out of date brand in my view. This certainly changes something about that view. It’s just that on the list of things that the company could have done to modernize their store and image, this has to be near the very bottom of ideas that I would think to ever implement.

Honestly, those who succeed/survive in brick and mortar I suspect are going to become more like an old fashioned general store in that it has no merchandise out in the public area. It would operate a “pick up in store” program like a tiny Amazon FC. Impulse items and specials probably advertised on a few big screens in a waiting lobby, with a few delivery doors that open up and dispense your order that’s been picked by whatever the most efficient method is (probably eventually heavily augmented with robotics). You can talk to a chatbot kiosk if you want to browse something outside of the app method.

The reason is that people seem to be indicating that they’d rather buy online, and also if crime doesn’t go down a lot, there isn’t much margin to keep supporting the rampant theft. If I were in charge of a flailing drugstore chain (and all of them are other than their PBM arms) I’d be experimenting with that model.