Walgreens Special Discount on Their Prescription Savings Club Membership

daven January 27, 2012 0

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Walgreens for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

For those of you who live near a Walgreens, they are currently offering a discount on their Prescription Savings Club at Walgreens plans. This program gives customers discounts on over 8,000 types of medication (both brand name and generic drugs), as well as discounts on flu shots, pet prescriptions, nebulizers, diabetic supplies, etc.

The two plans available are a family plan and an individual plan. With this promotion Walgreens is currently running, they can now be purchased for just $10 per year for coverage for your whole immediate family or $5 per year for an individual (the normal membership prices without this discount are $35 and $20 respectively). The family plan even includes coverage for your pets with discounts on any prescriptions you might need to buy for them.

Walgreens also offers a money-back guarantee that if you don’t save at least the price of the plan in a year, they’ll refund the difference.

Walgreens 24 hour pharmacies also provide a great deal of convenience over many other pharmacies out there. So, if you’re looking for savings on prescription drugs, this is a great plan to get.

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Bonus Factoids:

The first nebulizer was created by Sales-Girons in 1858. This device worked more or less like a bike pump today. Basically, it had a pump that when you pulled up, it drew in the liquid and when you pushed down it forced the liquid at high pressure through an atomizer. The person using the pump would then breathe in the vapor.
The reason people can still get the flu after being vaccinated is not because the vaccination didn’t work. Rather, it is because there are numerous strains of the influenza virus and only a few that are thought to be the ones that will become most common in the next few years are included every year in the vaccines developed by pharmaceutical companies (it takes around 6 months for a flu vaccination company to develop around one million doses worth of a flu vaccine).
Currently, a significant amount of research is being done on creating a universal flu virus to get around the above problem with the different strains of the virus. This universal flu vaccine carries the hope of finally (after at least 2400 years) wiping out influenza altogether. While no one has yet produced such a vaccine available for public consumption, several methods have been developed to accomplish this in the last few years, though, of course, it takes as much as 10-20 years for things like this to hit the market, even after they’re developed.
The current vaccines are typically developed by growing the most common strains of influenza in fertilized chicken eggs. The virus is then purified from the egg, killed (usually by using some form of detergent), and put into an intermediary substance to be delivered into your body. The two main methods are via a shot or via a nasal-spray. The latter nasal-spray version doesn’t include killed viruses, but rather uses weakened viruses, which will then infect you, but be easy for your immune system to overcome, often only causing slight symptoms for a day or two.
Millions of people every year get the flu and around 500,000 people per year die from it, with most of the deaths occurring in children and the elderly. While an exact number isn’t known due to the influenza virus often causing death by non-direct means like resultant pneumonia, it is estimated that around 25,000 people in the U.S. each year die as a result of the flu.
The first documented instance of the flu was all the way back around 400 BC by Hippocrates. Since then, the virus, which amazingly changes fairly significantly about once every ten years, has caused numerous pandemics and epidemics. The first confirmed instance of one of these was in 1580 that started in Russia and spread throughout all of Europe and most of Africa, killing an estimated 1 million people in a very short span. There are numerous other instances of such epidemics throughout history, but because the flu is easily confused with other diseases, confirming whether a particular instance was caused by the flu is hard to do.
Walgreens was founded in 1901 in Chicago Illinois by Charles Rudolph Walgreen. Originally, Walgreen worked at a shoe factory, but ended up losing one of his fingers at work. This probably seemed like a horrible thing at the time, but turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to him. The doctor who treated him ended up convincing Walgreen that he should stop working at the shoe factory and instead become an apprentice for a local druggist. Walgreen subsequently worked for pharmacist Isaac Blood for several years until Blood retired. At this point, Walgreen bought Blood’s store and began running it himself. Not satisfied with one store, Walgreen began to aggressively expand and offer other retail products besides just pharmaceuticals, and even opened lunch counters in his stores. Fast-forward to 1927 and there were now 110 Walgreens locations. Today, the company has grown to over 8000 store locations with about 250,000 employees and an annual revenue of around $70 billion per year, with a net income of just shy of $3 billion.
During prohibition, Walgreens saw a huge surge in profits thanks to the fact that they were allowed to sell alcohol for “medicinal” purposes. Thanks to the fact that it was exceptionally easy for people to get a prescription for alcohol, Walgreens profits soared and they were able to expand at an even faster rate than before, even during the beginning of the Great Depression, which ultimately didn’t effect Walgreens that much.
Walgreens claims they invented the Malted Milk Shake, though this isn’t entirely accurate. Malted milk drinks had been around since 1897 before Walgreens introduced their “Horlick’s Malted Milkshake” in 1922, which was just using more or less the standard malted milk drink recipe, mixed with two scoops of vanilla ice cream. The electric blender was also invented in 1922, which was used to make the shakes, rather than the old way of hand shaking the ingredients, which obviously didn’t produce and end drink that was much like what we think of today as shakes, even though the ingredients were more or less the same. In any event, with the invention of the electric blender, Walgreens used it to make their malted milk shake, that soon became hugely popular nation-wide thanks to them. So while they didn’t actually invent the malted milk shake specifically, they did popularize it.
Walgreen’s parents were immigrants from Sweden. His father’s surname was Olofsson, but was changed to Walgreen after they arrived in the United States.
Walgreen fought in the Spanish-American War with the 1st Illinois Volunteer Cavalry.