Shares of Rite Aid (RAD) recently plumbed multi-year lows, dropping to $0.60/share in late December and $0.79/share as of this writing (levels not seen since the 2008/2009 financial crisis), down from a high over $8.50/share as recently as January 2017 and the $4.50 to $8.50/share range in which the stock consistently traded during the three-year period from 2014 through 2016. We provided our views on why Rite Aid's management and board of directors have comprehensively failed shareholders several months ago in our article on Seeking Alpha entitled "Rite Aid - Vote 'Em Out On October 30th". We followed this article up with a blog post entitled "Rite Aid - Last Chance For Shareholders To Effect Change", which outlined additional problematic corporate governance and executive compensation issues requiring immediate corrective action by the company's leadership.

Disappointingly, all incumbent directors were re-elected at the annual meeting, meaning the company's shareholders will most likely suffer from suboptimal leadership at their company for the foreseeable future (as reflected in the current dismal stock price). Even worse, the company has utterly failed to follow up on its promises for further governance improvements. However, all is not (yet) lost, since we think that Rite Aid now stands primed for targeting by one or more activist hedge funds, which could benefit massively from a campaign to unseat the incumbent board and replace Rite Aid's failed management team. In this article, we provide the following: (1) an update on Rite Aid's corporate governance story, in light of promises made by the board of directors leading up to last year's annual meeting, (2) an explanation as to why the recently announced reversal split proposal is detrimental to Rite Aid shareholders and (3) specifics regarding why and how the company could become a prime target for an activist sooner rather than later (i.e., a "playbook for an activist" in Rite Aid).

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