CVS Health Takes More Baby Steps Toward Walking the Walk on Healthy Living

CVS Health (NYSE: CVS) is becoming that annoying family scold who furrows their brow and wrinkles their nose at anything that smacks of fun. Three years after it stopped selling cigarettes, the drugstore chain is now moving candy toward the back of its stores and adding "healthier" snacks to the front. It's also eliminating from its shelves -- ahead of new FDA restrictions set to take effect next year -- foods that contain partially hydrogenated oils, the predominant type of trans fat in our diets. And it will no longer sell tanning oils and sunscreens with SPFs below 15.

Yet although candy accounts for 5% or so of drugstore sales, according to the market analysts at Nielsen, CVS won't suffer quite as much as it did when it quit offering tobacco products, a choice that wiped away $2 billion in annual sales. Despite cigarettes amounting to only a tiny fraction of its $139 billion in total sales in 2014, they helped drive sales of other products, and their ban dramatically lowered so-called "front store" comparable sales in the quarters that followed. 

Image source: Getty Images.

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Source: Fool.com