spent $100 million more than that just to build the centers.
While they sat idle, the wellness centers occupied valuable real
estate inside the stores that could have been put to other, profitable
uses. Fed up with waiting, Renda and Bradley put together various
ideas for how the space could be utilized. One of them was to staff the
centers with nutritionists who would offer dietary advice. Another was
to turn them into full-fledged medical clinics run by nurse
practitioners. Yet another was to offer telemedicine services. They
lobbied Burd to let them implement these plans but, after discussing
the matter with Elizabeth, he turned them down. She didn’t want to
surrender the space, he said.
Behind the scenes, Safeway’s board of directors was losing patience.
After twenty years in the job, it was clear that Burd had lost the
confidence of Wall Street. His first decade as CEO had been a big
success and featured a sharp rise in Safeway’s stock price. But in
recent years, his passion for health and wellness had made him lose
sight of what remained at the heart of the company: the unglamorous
business of selling groceries. The large investment made in the
wellness centers and the endless delays in bringing it to fruition were
the last straw.
Shortly after the stock market closed on January 2, 2013, Safeway
put out a press release announcing that Burd would retire the
following May after the company’s annual shareholder meeting. The
news was presented as a voluntary decision, but Renda and other
executives suspected that the board had asked him to step down. Even
on his way out, Burd remained upbeat about the prospects for the still-
secret Theranos partnership. Among a list of his achievements as CEO,
the press release quoted him as saying that Safeway would soon “be
rolling out a wellness initiative that has the potential to transform the
Company.”
After Burd’s departure, the communication channel to Elizabeth was
lost. Anyone from Safeway who wanted to talk to Theranos had to go
through Sunny or the Frat Pack. Sunny acted put-off whenever
Safeway executives asked for status updates, as if his time was too
precious to waste and they had no idea what it took to produce an