In February 2014, CVS Caremark announced its decision to stop selling tobacco starting October 2014, to promote health and well being.

Now, a month earlier than the anticipated date, not only has CVS wiped its shelves clean of nicotine, but the company has also majorly reconstructed the superficiality of its brand: on 3 September 2014, it officially changed its name from CVS Caremark to CVS Health.

Source: http://www.cvshealth.com
All trademarks belong to CVS Health Corporation; my usage of such trademarks are justified within the scope of Fair Use.

Was this seemingly ethical decision of getting rid of tobacco actually cloaking a strategic decision?

CVS, more than a decade prior to this debacle, had established Minute Clinic, a walk-in clinic within CVS stores.  This effectively branched the company from not just providing pharmaceuticals, but into practicing health care.   Minute Clinic is an alternative to waiting at the doctor’s office, or the hospital.  It’s quick, efficient, and CVS’s way of tapping into the practicing market.

Having established the intention of branching into practicing health care, it only made sense for CVS to stop the sale of tobacco.  After all, you would never see a shelf full of cigarettes for sale at the doctor’s office.  In order to gain the trust of their customers, CVS decided to eliminate these goods, and an estimated $2 billion  in sales.  What seems like a lot of money to you and I, is only a fraction of CVS’s revenue in 2013–$126.761 billion, and an infinitesimal amount of what CVS will earn by taking over parts of the medical practitioners sector.

In order to gain trust, CVS cloaked this “tapping into another industry” by rebranding itself as a health care company.  It has cloaked this seemingly ethical decision under what Friedman (“The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profits“) asserts is called the “social responsibility of a business”.

But really, CVS could have just gotten Friedman’s approval by not attempting to cloak its real intentions.  What the CEO was doing all along was simply being socially responsible, by the only way a manager should be (according to Friedman), by “[using the company’s] resources…to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game”.