Inside The Loop’s new super-swanky Walgreens location
Anarchists and anti-capitalists, cover thine eyes. The A.V. Club is about to shill hard for a major corporation, and we’re not going to be all that precious about it. Here we go: The new super-fancy Walgreens at State and Randolph is pretty sweet.
We know, we know. It’s a freaking Walgreens. They make shitty store-brand beer and have terrible customer service. They also, especially on weekend mornings, attract absolutely the dregs of society and hordes—hordes, we say—of hungover women without makeup. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. We’ve been both makeupless and in totally deplorable condition ourselves on occasion.
That being said, Walgreens is a local company, and it’s pretty nice that it chose to put its new flagship store in the loop. It’s two stories, for crying out loud. It has a juice bar! More than that, though, it pretty much has everything.
Well, probably not everything. Walgreens will never be a good place to get a nice piece of pork belly or an Erlenmeyer flask. This two-story mega-Walgreens, though, does have a lot more than the average drugstore shopper would expect, from the aforementioned juice bar to the adjacent frozen yogurt station and sushi chefs, it’s kind of mind-bending. Granted, the sushi is kind of questionable, given that there only seem to be a few options, most of which include imitation crab and cucumber or are “whimsically” topped with mango, but hey, it’s a start. There is also a fairly extensive prepared foods section, as well as a coffee counter and Coke freestyle machine.
This is going to sound very weird, but hear us out: The Walgreens at State and Randolph would be a good place for a cheap and kind of weird girls’ night out. Start with some smoothies and sushi, then venture upstairs to the nail bar—a freaking nail bar—for manicures and brow shaping. Test out perfumes and makeup from both your standard drugstore brands and some fancier-sounding unknowns and then head downstairs to the wine bar—a freaking wine bar—for some tasting, perhaps coupled with some cupcakes and teeth-jarringly sweet red velvet cake from the bakery toward the front of the store. Head on over to the Chicago Theatre next door for a show, and that’s a heck of an evening. A weird evening, totally, but an interesting one all the same.
Long story short, this Walgreens is pretty neat. It seems kind of awful to say and even stranger to mean, but if you’re in the area, you should go, even for a few minutes and not necessarily to actually shell out dough. As a store, it inspires a kind of retail awe that stands in direct contrast to Block 37 directly across the street, as well as a sort of off-putting Chicagoland pride for our next-level commitment to both buying crap and selling it to the masses. If it’s possible to put both a humidor and an automatic perfume-spritzing station in a store, why can’t we put a man on Mars?
SLIDESHOW: Chicago's newest Walgreens store
