[QUOTE=Really Not All That Bright]
CVS and Walgreens do seem to have an almost unique ability to shutter a perfectly good building in order to put up another one six feet away, and yet remain profitable.
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That does hold true for Chicago, though. Walgreens had a location on Washington between State and Dearborn, then opened a Super Walgreens* at Randolph and State, and now are going to close the Washington location but reopen one block south in the former Sears space at Madison & State. They also closed a location on Michigan Avenue when they opened another Super Walgreens in the Wrigley Building about a block away.
*I don’t think they’re actually called that, but their larger flagship more department-store-like concept.
In my town of about 19,000 people, a quick Google search shows 23 pharmacies - and I know of at least 5-6 more that Google didn’t show. I’m not really sure why we need so many, but it seems to work for them.
They have a big pharmacy benefit management component to their company. In other words, they are not just drugstores, they also have a big role as the middlemen paying prescription drug claims for insurance companies. This is something Walgreen lacks.
Yes, I’'ve been assigned to SilverScript for my Part D. As a result, I can use any walk-in pharmacy for my prescriptions, but if I want to use mail fulfillment, they refuse to honor any provider except Caremark CVS.
Are you part of a multi-city? I used to live in a town of about 15,000, and we had about 6 pharmacies, which did include a Walmart, a 24-hour Walgreens, and another that was affiliated with the hospital. There was also an independent store that relied on delivery and was also contracted with the county jail (I went in there once; the place was filthy and I found out later that the owner often came to work drunk - and I found out more recently that he drowned in a nearby lake in 2013). Another independent store had several contracts with local nursing homes, and had to have a separate business license and phone number.
I couldn’t imagine a town that size having that many pharmacists in the first place, let alone enough business to keep them solvent unless they were very, very specialized.
One thing you can be sure of. You will be told to walk around the drug store (which sells lots of other things) for at least an hour, because that’s how long it takes an educted pharmacist (who’s been to college for 7 years) to take a factory-sealed bottle off a shelf and scan it.
No, no multicity - just a middle class metro area. There is one independent store that has been around for 50+ years, a ton of CVS and Walgreens types and every Walmart and grocery store has a pharmacy as well. It’s pretty crazy, but if one works it right it’s possible to come out ahead sometimes by transferring prescriptions from one pharmacy to the next and taking advantage of the cash back/coupons/etc.
Better not tell the pharmacist that, because s/he will make you wait for ANOTHER hour. :mad:
It took an hour because there were probably a couple dozen other prescriptions ahead of you, whether you realized it or not. Also, who knows what that e-script your doctor sent really said. You’d be surprised how messed up some of them are.
I noticed one thing about CVS when I lived in L.A., which was that there was a much larger CVS in my general area which seemed to be a distribution point for the smaller stores in the area, in addition to being another branch in the area, albeit larger. This store has a huge prescription department that’s open every day, which is why I tend to think they may be handling the orders for the other nearby stores. Additionally, they seemed to carry a wider range of all the usual drugstore products; for instance, I could always find safety razor blades there when none of the other branches had them.
So a new store may not necessarily duplicate what a nearby outlet of the same chain does.
I’m sure this happens in other places and with other companies.
It sounds to me like they deprioritize people who are in the store. Which I guess makes sense, since they promise a specific time for the people who call in.
I remember as a kid going to a locally owned pharmacy where you could just show up after your doctor’s appointment and get your medicine in a reasonable amount of time, but it’s been an extremely long time since then. Heck, it was back when I might actually hand them a prescription.
Now, we always call. The doctor usually will give a free sample for the first dose (other than antibiotics), so you have hours before you need the medicine.
We prioritized people who were waiting, and people who had something they needed right away. RNATB is partially correct, if there is an insurance issue. Nowadays, with electronic prescribing, who knows when the prescription will arrive at the pharmacy and what it will actually say. Doctors hate it, pharmacists hate it, and patients hate it. It’s not an option nowadays, either. :smack:
All of the newer CVS locations in my town have been built with a vacant second story that’s renting out the space for offices or whomever else wants them. As best I can tell, nobody does. Is this happening elsewhere?
I guess tacking on an extra story is a relatively small cost compared to the total ticket price of putting up a whole new building.
Seems like they’re banking pretty hard on not only being around for a while, but becoming epicenters of commerce in their areas.
That seems like a pretty brilliant plan, since those pop up pharmacies seem to be build very quickly, I assume because they are build off very similar architecting and floorplans and so I assume are pretty cheap to make. So if they can make office-pharmacies as fast as they can make regular pharmacies it might be a moneymaker since they’d be created cheaper and faster than other office space.
Walgreens had a location on Washington between State and Dearborn, then opened a Super Walgreens* at Randolph and State, and now are going to close the Washington location but reopen one block south in the former Sears space at Madison & State. They also closed a location on Michigan Avenue when they opened another Super Walgreens in the Wrigley Building about a block away.