Walgreens is expanding its office in the Loop, bringing 300 tech jobs to its space in the Sullivan Center.
The drug store giant said Tuesday that it is creating a new "technology center of excellence" at its downtown Chicago office, where it will double the number employees that work there currently. The 300 jobs will be a combination of new hires and relocations from its headquarters in Deerfield. Crain's reported earlier Tuesday that Walgreens signed a five-year lease for 27,000 additional square feet of space.
Walgreens said the downtown office will host most of the company’s retail pharmacy technology team along with the digital, mobile and e-commerce technology units.
“Chicago and Walgreens have a long and shared history of innovation and ingenuity,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a statement. “That history makes Chicago the perfect city for Walgreens to locate 300 jobs and make an investment in its future.”
“We are excited to bring more technology jobs to the City of Chicago and establish a technology center of excellence that will focus on delivering state-of-the-art systems to our more than 8,000 drugstores nationwide,” added Alex Gourlay, president of Walgreens.
The news comes on the heels of Facebook's major expansion to its Chicago office, where it's adding three floors and around 100,000 additional square feet to its office on Wacker Drive. The expanded space looks to house hundreds of additional workers. It also comes as the city officially launched its bid to land Amazon's HQ2.
Walgreens says it employs more than 3,500 people in the City of Chicago.
