If you’ve ever wondered where the CVS in CVS Pharmacy booths comes from, check out what someone … [+]
On TikTok, @nisipisa recently said she “got this spray for dry mouth from ‘Consumer Value Stores’, and the experience of using it is like someone in the middle of chewing gum spitting in your mouth.” Here are the telling images and video of what that TikToker said:
As of June 16, this video had received over 23.3,000 likes and over 400 comments, presumably not because people wanted the please-can-someone-spit-in-my-mouth experience. No, most of the comments were about the name “Consumer Value Stores” dropped by @nisipisa. If you’re wondering WTF, think what you’d get if you turned “Consumer Value Stores” into a three-letter acronym.
Don’t you see the CVS in that name? That’s CVS, as in the drugstore chain, the mega health care company, and the place to buy all those Father’s Day cards. Yes, the CVS does not stand for multiple curriculum vitae in this case. It doesn’t mean “Chocolate, Vanilla, Strawberry” or “Crazy Vacuum Store” or “Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome” or even “ConVenience Store”.
No, a look at the CVS Health website will show you the true origins of CFS. The website says that in 1963 “the first Consumer Value Store selling health and beauty products is established in Lowell, Massachusetts. A year later the name is changed to CVS.” And based on many of the comments below the TikTok video, many people today were years old when they discovered that fact.
That’s despite the fact that many people have probably used the CVS name at least at some point in their lives, as in “My CVS receipt was so long that I could have written the movie’s script.” avatar2 on it” or “When there was a shortage of toilet paper I used my…” well you get the idea. After all, CVS has become quite a mega company since its early Consumer Value Store days. By the end of 1988, this company had expanded to 750 stores with total sales of nearly $1.6 billion. Over the next two decades, CVS did what many large corporations do today: acquire other companies. Their acquisitions included a range of different healthcare-related companies, such as MinuteClinic, thousands of Sav-On and Osco drugstores, Caremark, Coram, Omnicare, Navarro Discount Pharmacy, and all of Target’s 1,600 pharmacies and clinics, and in 2018, CVS Health acquired insurance giant Aetna to get even bigger.
Along the way, Tom Ryan, who served as CEO of CVS from 1998 to 2011, indicated that he led the company to provide convenience, value and service. While these three words could be “abbreviated” to CVS, they never became an official spelling of CVS.
CVS is not the only acronym embedded in the American lexicon. Did you know that 3M stands for the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company? Or A&W for the surnames of the company’s founders: Roy Allen and Frank Wright? What about BMW for Bavarian Motor Works, H&M for Hennes and Mauritz, and REI for Recreational Equipment, Inc.? M&M doesn’t stand for “Mmm, those are tasty.” Instead, it’s short for Mars & Murrie’s. Likewise, PAM Cooking Spray does not belong to anyone named Pam. It originated from Arthur Meyerhoff’s Product. And NERF is not a nerd who farts. Instead came the acronym of Non-Expandable Recreational Foam. Then there’s SPAM, which grew out of Pork and Ham Shoulder.
Acronyms can serve as handy shortcuts so you don’t have to say something like “Is there a restroom in the Consumer Value Store” when you really need to go. Over time, they can be used so much that you eventually forget where they came from. But every now and then it can be valuable to remind consumers what the acronym tan stood for in the first place.