Three buddies make their way to the front registers, their small shopping carts packed with vodka, wine, soda, chips, bags of ice and a whole lot of beer. Others stroll the aisles looking at the hundreds, maybe thousands, of shot glasses, flasks, ash trays and shirts for sale, many with familiar Las Vegas themes — booze, gambling, sex and partying.
“Party Like A Rock Star” says a 64-ounce, or half-gallon, flask. “SIZE MATTERS” declares one that can hold 128 ounces — a full gallon — of alcohol.
The store is on the Strip, but it’s not your typical liquor depot or Vegas party shop. It’s a Walgreens pharmacy.
Las Vegas’ resort corridor is peppered with Walgreens and CVS Pharmacy stores, with more on the way. The chains are drawn to the Strip for its heavy foot traffic and tourists’ universal need for water, snacks, medicine and the not-so-occasional hotel-room party.
Landlords want them because national pharmacies are stable tenants that do big business, sign long-term leases and can easily afford the area’s eye-popping rents.
They pay about $300,000 a year in rent for a typical residential store but around $2 million a year for space on the Strip, said broker Ray Germain, a senior associate with Marcus & Millichap.
“Their sales at these locations are just phenomenal,” he said.
Walgreens has five stores on the Strip, all on the east side of the boulevard, stretching from around Showcase Mall to Convention Center Drive. The company plans to open another one in the area this spring, in a newly built retail plaza at the northeast corner of Sahara Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard, across from SLS Las Vegas.
CVS has two stores on the Strip, both on the west side — one is next to Monte Carlo just outside CityCenter, and the other is at the base of Sky Las Vegas, a luxury condo tower across from the mothballed Fontainebleau resort.
The retailer plans to open another store on the west side of the Strip at the end of March, in the new three-story mall at Treasure Island, CVS Health Corp. spokesman Mike DeAngelis confirmed.
There is one more CVS being planned for the Strip, and it could “potentially” open in 2016, DeAngelis said. He declined to say where exactly it would set up shop.
The resort corridor is a gold mine for such stores — there are about 38,600 hotel and motel rooms on and just north of the Strip, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, and it’s the valley’s main concentration of jobs, with tens of thousands of workers cycling through each day.
“I think you just answered your own question,” Walgreens spokesman Phil Caruso said, when asked why pharmacies flock to the packed area.
Germain, the broker, said one of his current listings — the Walgreens property at Convention Center Drive — at one point had the highest sales totals of any in the chain. That distinction now apparently belongs to the Walgreens between the Venetian and the Palazzo, he said.
Walgreens has about 8,200 stores and booked $76.4 billion in sales in the year ending Aug. 31, according to a regulatory filing. Caruso declined to comment on individual stores’ performance.
Meanwhile, pharmacy properties sell for big dollars on the Strip.
In separate deals in 2012, landlords sold the Walgreens property between the Venetian and the Palazzo for $71 million and the Walgreens at Convention Center Drive for $28 million. Last spring, investors sold the CVS property in Sky Las Vegas for $30 million.
Current owners of the Walgreens property at Convention Center do not have a listing price, but Germain said his clients are aiming for more than $40 million.
Not all of the Walgreens and CVS locations on the resort corridor have or will have pharmacies, but they sell items you’d see in any neighborhood store — gum, juice, bottled water, cosmetics, shampoo.
And, this being the Strip, they also sell items fit for the epicenter of this tourist and party town.
The Walgreens between the Venetian and the Palazzo, which has a pharmacy and a health clinic, not only has soda fountains, Icee machines, self-serve frozen yogurt and ready-to-go sandwiches, it also sells tons of Las Vegas memorabilia — T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, ladies’ tank-tops, key chains, magnets, oven mitts, calendars, picture frames, photo albums, coffee mugs, baseballs, coasters and spoon rests.
And then there’s the booze — tequila, rum, vodka, whiskey, wine and beer, with different brews lined up on shelves in a refrigerated room dubbed the “beer cave.”
“Alcohol would be one of our (top) sellers,” a store manager said.