Category:
Business
Region:
USA
State:
Tennessee
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FAMILY PHARMACY FALLS VICTIM TO FISCAL PRESSURES
Source: TriCities.com
Date: 16-May-2007
Author: Caitlin Sullivan
ABINGDON - Tuesday was a tough day for the Ellis family.
Wednesday may have been tougher. It was the day they locked the doors to their Main Street pharmacy.
After more than 50 years in business, Ellis Pharmacy is closed. Rite Aid, located about a mile down the road, acquired the business.
"I'm as sad as sad could be," Doug Ellis said. "We've cried. I really tried to keep this."
His dad and mom, Harold and Yvonne Ellis, started the drugstore in 1954. He had worked with his father managing the pharmacy and home health business next door from the 1980s until his father died a few years ago.
"This is kind of like him dying all over again," Ellis said, looking around at the store where items neatly lining the shelves.
"It used to be a relationship between the pharmacist and patient - no longer," he said. "I don't blame Rite Aid, I blame more the third-party (insurance companies). They control all the prices and services you can provide. Pharmacy has become a commodity."
He said 2006 was the worst operational year ever, mainly because insurance companies now control the market and the start of the Medicare Part D prescription drug plan that makes untimely payments to pharmacies. For an independent pharmacist overhead is expensive and it's tough to compete with the number of the large stores.
"I don't have the purchasing power (of a Rite Aid)," Ellis said. "It makes it very hard for independent pharmacists to stay in business."
David Moore, Rite Aid Pharmacy district manager, said convenience is the key.
"There's not enough time anymore, people want to make fewer stops so people with bigger stores will get those customers," Moore said.
Ellis said it wasn't the town or customer base that let them down.
"We've had families trade with us the entire 50 years," he said.
Moore said it's been very difficult for the Ellis family.
"I've done a lot of these acquisitions," he said. "You're ripping their heart out. It's just tearing him up."
The Ellises will continue their home health supply business and some of their employees will begin working at Rite Aid. The family is not planning on selling the building.
Ellis said he'd like to see an old-fashioned soda fountain in the pharmacy's place.
Small pillboxes, scales, yellowed and frayed prescription slips and worn bottles dress the tall, smooth cabinets along the store walls. Ellis said Rite Aid may be taking the business but they're not taking his dad's collection.
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