You know if companies want to go green an help the environment then I'm completely fine with that. Honestly how can you hate anything that is going to help the planet we live on and make the world a better place? The thing that pisses me off is when companies claim that they are "going green" in order to sucker a few more consumers into their stores because they think its environmentally friendly. The main store that is pissing me off with this is none other than the largest drugstore chain in the nation, Walgreens. Now has Walgreens done a few things to "go green", sure, I bet Hitler did a few good things in his lifetime too but you don't hear people bragging about it. I'll admit that comparison is a tad extreme but still, they shouldn't be bragging about all the good things they are doing when they clearly have no room to talk. My number one gripe with Walgreens is that they are still on a paper coupon format.

Not only that, as you can see above there are three different ad papers along with two sheets printed out just in case you missed the others, there are stacks of all of these around the store. Meanwhile while they do still have useually one ad that is much smaller than walgreens, places like Food Lion, CVS, Kroger, Harris Teeter, etc. All have gone to cards that can be scanned at the register, why doesn't Walgreens go with a card? Well that's easy because I worked there for a few years, if they did that they would probably lose money. I worked as a manager of one of their photo departments and one of the things the district photo manager used to push was having a coupon percentage under 2%. To achieve this you were told not to tell customers about any specials unless they specifically asked you about them, you also weren't supposed to have any of the weekly ads near the photo counter in case the customers happen to stumble upon one and find a coupon. When the district photo manger would visit sotres he would actually throw any ads he saw on your counter away and give you a nice lecture about your coupon percentage. On top of that I don't see how throwing away stacks and stacks of mass produced unused WEEKLY ad papers should entitle your company to ever utter the term "going green" to the media. That's not even counting the countless ad tags that get printed on a weekly basis.

The next time you go into a Walgreens look at all the red or blue tags up around the store that say "as advertised", "Megasaver", or "Register Rewards" and then explain to me how they're going green. As a matter of fact look at the price tags while your at it.

Walgreens has a system of resets and revisions which really don't serve a purpose sometimes. As you can see above these were pictures of a rivision which had to be done because Walgreens decided that all price tags that said "Walgreens" whatever batteries needed to say "W" whatever batteries instead. I wish i could say that Walgreens blatant wastefulness ends their but it doesn't because when you actually do buy products that come with register rewards, guess what you get at the register after you pay.

The amount of wasted paper is endless, something that the general public will never see is how wasteful the photo department's label printer actually is, glitches in the Walgreens photo program causes the label for the same order to be printed over and over again for no apparent reason. One store doing that isn't so bad but when your the largest drug store chain in the nation, that's a problem. Kind of like Walgreens taking it upon themselves to print a supply list for every school within a 10 mile radius when the school usually provides those, which is probably why its September 3rd, school starts in a few days and the lists look untouched.

Even when Walgreens does do something right they end up shooting themselves in the foot. Sure you can have you printer cartridges refilled at Walgreens or even recycled at Walgreens but if you have it refilled there, guess what you get to help them do, waste more paper.

That is Walgreen's ink jet refill machine but before you give the ink jet back to the customer it has to be tested, the machine tests it three times and each test chews up a good amount of paper which is why it has its own trash can there to catch it. You would tend to think that when a company claims its "going green" it would at least recycle, think again. The store I worked at was supposed to recycle but didn't care enough to actually have two different trash pick up services. And since I'm speaking of trash, Walgreens tosses out at least 15 bags of trash per night, do you think those trash bags are eco friendly, nope! Just remember people, you can't always believe what these big companies say because usually if you do a little bit of digging you'll find out they're full of shit.