Maria Aspan’s Post

I can't quite believe that today is my last day at Fortune. I'm incredibly grateful to have worked here over the past almost-five years, and for all of the professional opportunities I've been given, including to write my last big feature for our new Fortune 500 issue, about the national crisis affecting your corner drugstore: https://lnkd.in/eQ5-Zda2 Since I joined Fortune in late 2019, my editors and colleagues there have given me the opportunity to take some big swings on feature reporting and investigative projects, some of which have had national impact; to indulge my professional curiosity as a business journalist, by covering a wide range of companies and CEOs and crucial stories; to co-chair the iconic Fortune Most Powerful Women and to interview top newsmakers at so many Fortune events, including Brainstorm Health; and to learn from some of the best journalists in the business. Thank you in particular to Phil W. and Matthew Heimer for bringing me into Fortune in the first place; to Clifton Leaf for hiring me, and to Matt, Kristen Bellstrom, Brian O'Keefe, Claire Zillman, and Indrani Sen for their thoughtful and incisive editing of my big swings and other favorite projects. Thank you to Erika Fry for teaching me so much about investigative journalism, feature writing, and the mind-boggling intricacies of health care; to Phil for always being generous with his encyclopedic knowledge (and incisive, funny analysis) of all things business; to Jennifer Fields for her wit and wisdom and impeccable judgment, and for assembling a killer team of smart, kind, and accomplished journalists on Fortune Well; to Scott DeCarlo for the incredible data analysis and generosity as a colleague that have made so many of my stories-and so much of what Fortune does-possible; to Lydia Belanger, whose unflappable leadership and quiet excellence are behind so much of how our work is read; to the amazing teams on MPW and Brainstorm Health and other events, in the newsroom and across our events and business side; and to Fortune's impressive art and production and copy and audience and EA teams, who have made my work shine and be seen, including Peter Herbert Mia Diehl Josue Evilla Christine Bower-Wright Alexandra Scimecca Michele Taylor Maria Carmicino Lauren Goldstein Katherine Raymond Ashley Lutz Rachel Ventresca Cheyann Harris Jack Long Sharon Lawrence Carmen Melendez Hildegarde Vilmenay. There are so many other amazing colleagues I've learned from and been inspired by, and who I'm going to miss working with tremendously. I'm especially grateful to Alan Murray for his leadership of Fortune through the pandemic, and to Alyson Shontell and Anastasia Nyrkovskaya for their leadership today. I’m honored to have been a part of Fortune’s 95-year legacy of fantastic and important journalism, and I look forward to continuing to cheer on all of its tremendous work.

Always impressed and inspired by my colleague and friend Phil W., who wrote three (!!) amazing stories for the new Fortune 500 issue, including a Walmart CEO interview and a really fun deep dive into the cult fueling Costco Wholesale's business success.

"The death of the American pharmacy." For the new issue of Fortune, I wrote about Bartell Drugs, the beloved Seattle drugstore that’s slowly dying under RITE AID, and the larger health care crisis sweeping our nation’s pharmacies. What's happening at Bartell's and in Seattle is a microcosm of a much bigger disaster. American drugstores are caught in a perfect storm of factors, including the wide-ranging retail apocalypse. But almost everyone—including big-company CEOs, independent pharmacists, third-party analysts, and bipartisan lawmakers—blames the drug industry middlemen known as PBMs, or pharmacy benefit managers, for squeezing the margins of what pharmacies actually get paid for filling prescriptions. “I’m very concerned about what’s happened in our state, and I definitely think that PBMs have played a role in the closure of some independent pharmacies,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, the Washington Democrat who has cosponsored legislation that would regulate PBMs with Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, told me. “The situation is now very urgent,” she adds. “When you take a pharmacy out of a neighborhood, and they no longer have that in their community, it’s a real problem.” (Representatives for these PBMs, however, argue that they’re looking out for customers, and they’re not to blame for pharmacy closures.) Big chains and small independents are also facing plenty of other, and varied, business challenges. But the cumulative effect is disastrous for all of us. “Pharmacies are in shambles,” as Abdi Athur, a Seattle-area pharmacist, told me. “If even big chains cannot survive—and even CVS Pharmacy and Walgreens are hurting—what do you expect for the small pharmacies?” Read my full feature here, and in the June/July issue of Fortune:

This was a lot of fun. Thanks so much to all who joined us last week at Fortune's Brainstorm Health event, for some important and urgent conversations, including Larry Levitt Lee Shapiro Meghan FitzGerald Jane van Dis, MD Surella Segú Frederique Dame Rebecca Lynn Chirag Shah Victoria Treyger Patrick Carroll Bobak Azamian, MD, PhD Sarita T. Finnie. And congratulations to all those who put together this impressive event, including cochairs Jennifer Fields and Erika Fry, guest cochairs Christina Farr and Deena Shakir, and my wonderful colleagues, including Alexa Mikhail Lindsey Leake, M.A.² Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez Andrew Nusca Cheyann Harris Irina Ivanova Alena Botros

Climate change, the health care affordability crisis, how to spot the best investing opportunities in health care, and how to better empower all of us as patients...we're tackling some big, urgent topics at Fortune's Brainstorm Health conference, starting today in California, and I'm so looking forward to moderating conversations with Surella Segú Jane van Dis, MD Meghan FitzGerald Larry Levitt Lee Shapiro Frederique Dame Rebecca Lynn Chirag Shah Victoria Treyger Bobak Azamian, MD, PhD Patrick Carroll Sarita T. Finnie and more! https://lnkd.in/ekJp9UKz

Soho House & Co, the global chain of private, members-only clubs, has survived almost three decades as a closely watched arbiter of young, cosmopolitan, vaguely creative cool. (The rooftop pools! The OG Sex and the City! Gawker parties! Prince Harry's first dates with Meghan Markle!) But the company, which was founded in 1995 and went public in 2021, has never made money. Its massive growth over the past decade has left Soho House carrying a mounting load of expensive debt, which will make achieving profitability even more difficult. And today, the markets are much less forgiving of companies that prioritize growth over profits. And even as Soho House tries to bring its spending and debt load in line, it also has to reckon with the thornier—and less measurable—recent damage to its public perception. A recent short-seller report criticizing its finances kicked off a round of international headlines debating whether or not Soho House is indeed still “cool”—or if its yearslong push for growth has threatened its not-for-everyone core appeal. So is it possible to expand—at least as aggressively as Soho House has—while still remaining exclusive and aspirational? It's the eternal question for so many businesses trying to grow at all costs: Is it really possible to produce the same high quality at higher volume? I sat down in London last week with Soho House CEO Andrew Carnie to discuss all of this, and his "three to five year plan" to turn his company around, for a new feature for Fortune:

Adidas's #DEI problems go far beyond the Yeezy fiasco. Black celebrities have long given Adidas its cool factor��but behind the scenes, the sportswear company is losing or pushing out Black executives, Lila MacLellan reports for Fortune: "Since the beginning of 2023, 10 Black and brown executives at the VP level and above—many hired in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021 during the reckoning in corporate America following the murder of George Floyd—have been pushed out or quit, Fortune has learned. At least eight other Black executives in key roles in the U.S. have also departed since 2020." This is a fascinating, nuanced, deeply reported, and depressing case study of what corporate America's DEI pullback looks like in action at one company: https://lnkd.in/e6w6c_C9

If there’s one overarching question I’m most interested in when I profile someone, it is: How do you react to change? It comes for us all, inevitably. So do you actively seek it, reluctantly embrace it—or try at all costs to avoid it? How people choose to navigate life’s moments of transition is what drew me to Stephanie Linnartz, taking a leap after 25 years at Marriott International and landing on the treacherous astroturf of Under Armour. The same curiosity made want to sit down with Aflac CEO Dan Amos, who’s been running his oddball life insurance company—yes, the one with that duck—for the past 34 years. More about my recent Fortune profile of Amos, and how he thinks about some of life's inevitable changes, here: https://lnkd.in/eBsHbTSx

You wouldn't think that a three-letter word should open up such a complicated wasps' nest for companies. But when the word is "man"—as in, "Should the most powerful person on our board be called a 'chairman' or a gender-neutral 'chair'?"—keeping or removing those three letters from official titles gets incredibly tricky. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s part of the DEI backlash where people are like, let’s not kick this wasp nest right now,” Alicia Syrett tells Bloomberg, in this smart analysis by Zachary Fleming Cameron Baker Andre Tartar Raeedah Wahid: