Sydney N.
Rite Aid, similar to stores such as CVS and Walgreens, is a drugstore chain that was founded in 1962.
Rite Aid Corp. volunteered to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This comes after a massive fall in sales and lawsuits over unlawful opioid (a painkiller) prescriptions. The bankruptcy could speed up the closure of unprofitable stores; up to 500 stores. Rite Aid agreed to sell Elixir, a benefits manager, to MedImpact Healthcare Systems. The company lost $5.7 billion in revenue in the last financial quarter, down from $6 billion the year before. Also, Rite Aid had a net loss of $300 million. In the opioid litigation, Rite Aid knowingly sold hundreds of thousands of unlawful prescriptions of controlled opioids. The opioid litigation also claimed that Rite Aid downplayed the risks of opioids in the opioid epidemic which killed over 1 million people by overdose since 1999. It is not the only pharmaceutical company to file for bankruptcy because of the litigation, but it is the biggest corporation.