Rosalind Brewer

This woman has served as CEO of Sam’s Club, COO of Starbucks, and CEO of Walgreens Boots Alliance.

Rosalind Brewer comes from Detroit.

She’s the daughter of GM assembly line workers.

The youngest of five kids.

And the first in her family to have gone to college.

She studied chemistry at Spelman and landed her first job in a lab at Kimberly-Clark.

She stayed there for 22 years, moving out of research and into executive leadership.

By the time she left, she was President of the $1B+ Global Nonwovens Division.

But her real rise started at Walmart.

She joined in 2006.

By 2012, she became President and CEO of Sam’s Club.

Five years later, she joined Starbucks as COO and Group President.

She was the first woman to hold the role.

She ran operations across the U.S., Canada, and Latin America.

When two Black men were wrongfully arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks, Roz didn’t deflect or deny.

She led the decision to close 8,000 stores for a full day of racial bias training.

Then, in 2021, Walgreens called.

They asked her to take the CEO role. Right in the middle of the pandemic.

She accepted.

That appointment made her the only Black woman CEO of an S&P 500 company.

At Walgreens, she had 325,000 employees under her leadership.

She focused on healthcare access, especially in underserved communities, and started reshaping the company’s strategy for a post-COVID world.

But Wall Street wasn’t patient.

The stock dropped 47% during her tenure.

She stepped down in 2023 to return to Spelman as Interim President.

She also serves on boards ranging from VillageMD to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.