The few mom and pop pharmacies left are hurting, not expanding.

Welcome to Sears/Kmart land.

And now the Walgreens are closing.

I am especially bitter at the loss of good pharmacists at one Rite Aid, and grrr mad that the nearest Walgreens was built on the site of an historic building they demolished. It’s now empty and for sale.

They never seemed to fully modernize, at least in the 4-5 stores I frequented. One Thrift was a pharmacist franchisee. When he retired the store itself became a 99 cent store. Then they built a palatial store on the other side of town, two stories, near Walgreens. But it closed in the pandemic and was for sale forever. Now it's a Bank of America. (Did Trump name that too?)

There are still chains of independent pharmacies in small towns. Usually one or two local pharmacists. Their merchandise is more relevant to health, old time remedies. There's not enough traffic there and they don't have to rely on pantry items, cold soda, garden merchandise, magazines, etc.

494 Rite Aid stores in Pennsylvania. Buh-bye.

... has had way too many near-barren shelves ever since the last bankruptcy. The only other pharmacy in this small town seems to be doing just fine. Now we have to navigate the procedures for transferring all of our prescriptions from Rite Aid to that establishment.
Corporatists just never seem to learn that the bottomless greed that drives their endless expansionism always collapses under the weight of gross mismanagement and delusions of grandeur. Bigger is never better. Economies of scale become a liability when companies fail to take into account the limitations of supplying too many franchises, paying a vast workforce, and keeping the product affordable for their customer base. Juggling running chainsaws has its downside.

I used to go to them. My god what a hassle.

I found a new place that DELIVERS to my front door FOR FREE and asks me no QUESTIONS at all and NEVER intimidates me the way Rite-Aid has done.

I can see why they have gone bankrupt!

... with our pharmacists, and they know mine, and they've always been super helpful. They may be an anomaly to the Rite Aid customer service model, but I'll feel badly for them having to travel some distance for a new gig; this is a very rural area.

that Walgreens is going to be taken over by a Hedge Fund? If so, isn't that the kiss of death for any business???

... they'll strip the assets and sell the husk. They employ the Mafia business model, but they have better tailors, and aren't quite as quick to make someone sleep with the fishes.

äfter a few more months, with the effects of all the things they are destroying, people are gonna start dropping like flies.

No Food and Drug, no vaccines, inability to afford food, cutting Medicare and Medicaid, Cutting Social Security or ending it, etc etc etc.

Putin must be ecstatic....................

More stores, more hype. Old business model proven to be the demise of many.They were not in it for the future.

Customer service and inventory immediately fall off a cliff. Shelves were rather bare, and it was impossible to get through to the pharmacy department by phone. I spent a few weeks trying to get a prescription filled (colonoscopy prep). The doc would phone it in and leave a message, which they never listened to. I wound up using an 'alternative' method involving a lot of GatorAde and various laxatives and the like. (It was actually more pleasant than the other stuff!)

We used to use this store quite a bit - they always had the best prices on a lot of local goods (mostly not stocked now) and cans of chopped and minced clams - also not stocked. Now we only go there for one-off prescriptions, and to use their package pickup locker. They cut staffing to the bare bones, and brought in a lot more national brands rather than the local items that Bartell's had always prided themselves on.