Walgreens, which has been a publicly-traded company for nearly a century, may be about to go private, according to the Wall Street Journal. The retailer — which also owns UK chain Boots — is reportedly in talks to sell to private equity company Sycamore for about $10 billion.

Walgreens has been struggling for about a decade now, and it’s not the only drug store chain that’s been having a hard time. Rite Aid filed for bankruptcy in October, CVS has been struggling, and all three chains have been closing stores by the score.

Walking into a big pharmacy these days can be kind of depressing: Empty shelves, locked-up products, long lines to pick up prescriptions.

“If your stores aren’t very good … then why would people bother to go in there?” said Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData Retail.

He said chain pharmacies were designed to be convenient: “The place you can quickly pop to if you need a pint of milk or you need to buy replacement skin care or something like that.”

For years, Saunders said, pharmacies figured people would just keep coming in, no matter what, because of that convenience factor.

“They became very lazy, they just don’t bother with retail,” he said.

And with so many other convenient options now, including speedy online delivery, customers have drifted away from pharmacies and sales have fallen, Saunders said.

On top of that, drugstores aren’t making nearly as much as they used to, said Dima Qato, a professor at the University of Southern California’s pharmacy school. They aren’t filling as many prescriptions, either, she said.

“Reimbursement for prescription drugs has declined, and that’s really the source of profit for pharmacies,” Qato said. “So that’s made it worse, and more challenging, for pharmacies to stay operational.”

The main reason they’re making less on prescriptions has to do with the consolidation of pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. They’re the companies that negotiate drug reimbursement rates with insurers, manufacturers and pharmacies.

George Hill, a managing director and equity research analyst at Deutsche Bank, said today, about 80% of prescriptions go through just three PBMs.

“They just have incredible negotiating power and incredible leverage, and have have done a great job of forcing retail pharmacies to compete against each other … which has led to dramatic erosion in pharmacy payments and pharmacy reimbursement,” he said.

Couple that with the decline in the in-store experience, and Hill said big pharmacy chains have found themselves in a downward spiral.

“The customer experience isn’t good, so fewer customers want to go there, so the stores make less money, so they have less money to invest in the customer experience, which means fewer people want to go there, which means earnings continue to erode,” he said.

And on and on. It’s a tough cycle to break.