Wednesday, October 18, 2023
Here's something new: The "pharmacy desert"
For most of the 20th Century, the model for pharmacies was pretty simple: Someone with a pharmacy degree would open up or take over a shop, and run it. People knew their pharmacist in the same way they know their dentist, and even small towns usually had a pharmacist.
That faded in most places about 40 years ago. As CNN reports, from 1980 to 2022, the number of independent pharmacies were but almost in half as huge chains swallowed their markets and merged with one another to create a few huge behemoths.
Those big chains probably over-expanded. I can't be the only one who noticed how often a CVS and Walgreens seem to be adjacent to one another, and how the service you got there differed from what you got from Mr. Treder over on Mack Ave. back in the day.
But now the big chains are failing. Rite-Aid is closing hundreds of stores, and the other big chains are following suit. That will leave wide swaths of the country without a pharmacy now that the independents are gone.
It's almost like maybe sort of there was a reason for antitrust enforcement once upon a time...
