"For the moment, we’re on pretty solid ground, and we’ve got enough people to work for us," he said. Rhode Island-based CVS has also been on a national buying spree, recently acquiring Eaton Apothecary, which has about 400 employees and 19 locations in Massachusetts, including one inside the Manet Community Health Center on West Squantum Street in Quincy.ĬVS, which has more than 9,800 retail locations across the country, also acquired Quincy's Baxter Pharmacy earlier this month, transferring its inventory and customer list to a nearby CVS location on Southern Artery.ĬVS, which also bought Quincy's Samoset Pharmacy 20 years ago, is actively courting independent drugstore owners with a web page pledging to help them "leave your pharmacy in good hands."īill MacArthur, a co-owner of Olden's Pharmacy in Weymouth, said he often gets calls or emails from people wanting to know if the owners would be willing to sell. Last year, Rite Aid agreed to sell 1,900 of its stores and three distribution centers to Walgreens and later began merger talks with Albertsons, a grocery store chain. "While some are closing, an equal number, or more, are opening," he said.īrown said he expects even more independents to open once the dust settles from a spate of mergers and acquisitions. Since then, however, the number of independent drugstores in Massachusetts has held steady and even grown by 10 to 20 locations, Brown said. But years of consolidation and fierce competition forced many to close, leaving roughly 150 privately owned pharmacies as of a few years ago.
To a person, they acknowledge the uphill battle of overcoming the ubiquity and name recognition of drugstore chains, but say they can keep customers by offering additional services, personal attention and a pharmacist whom customers know by name.ĭrugstores were once small, family-run neighborhood operations, numbering between 1,000 and 1,200 in Massachusetts at their peak in the 1970s, Todd Brown, executive director of the Stoughton-based Massachusetts Independent Pharmacists Association, said. In Braintree and Marshfield, other family-owned drugstores that have opened in recent years are already well established.Īfter decades of being decimated by powerful retail pharmacy chains like CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid, small family-run drugstores that once served nearly every neighborhood on the South Shore may be seeing a resurgence as a new generation of pharmacists who have worked in the chains strike out on their own. On the other side of the city, Andy Truong works the counter at a pharmacy he opened a little more than a year before that. After more than 60 years doling out medicine and advice to Quincy families, the Washington Street shop has gone the way of Blackwood Pharmacy, Samoset Pharmacy and other family-owned neighborhood drugstores that have succumbed to the advances of big pharmacy companies hungry for more customers.Īnd yet, a few miles away, on Congress Street, Kristen Young is helping customers at an independent pharmacy that opened only three months ago in a medical office building. QUINCY - Baxter Pharmacy's doors are locked, its carpeted floors littered with empty boxes between bare shelves.
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