The Rite Aid store and pharmacy on Liberty Street in Salem are closing. Why?

The Rite Aid store and pharmacy on Liberty Street in Salem are closing. Pharmacy accounts are being transferred to the pharmacy at the Safeway on Center Street. Neither location seems customer-friendly to me and I'm wondering how long the Safeway pharmacy will be operational. There are plain signs taped to the Safeway windows advertising openings for pharmacists and pharmacy techs but you get the feeling that this is Safeway or the pharmacy doing due diligence and nothing more. The signs feel more like admissions of defeat than they do new opportunities to serve the community. When I recently visited the Rite Aid on Lancaster Drive in Salem a worker there spoke of their job frustrations and talked about recent worker walkouts in pharmacies around the United States without prompting. Morale is running pretty low there, and I suspect that wages and working conditions at Rite Aid and other pharmacies are hitting the skids as well. The workers at the local Rite Aid and Walgreens pharmacies who I talk with are competent, friendly and helpful and they remember me, but it's pretty obvious that they're stressed.  

What's happening here in Salem is part of a national trend. Oregon Public Broadcasting ran a broadcast done by the "Here and Now" radio show about the pharmacies and the people who work in them today. The segment runs 32 minutes and is worth listening to because its sets a basic context for what is taking place as the Liberty Street Rite Aid closes and another over-worked pharmacy picks up some of the customers and we get crowded in and jostled in the supermarket aisles while waiting to speak to an over-worked and underpaid worker at the counter for a couple of minutes about our healthcare needs. Couldn't this all be handled differently and better?

The broadcast is titled "'Pharmageddon' And The Future Of Retail Pharmacies." Listen to the broadcast here.

Some companies see opportunities here. My Medicare Advantage Plus plan and Rite Aid have both been pressuring me with calls and mailings to change to a service that will deliver my meds and that will send a nurse or another healthcare worker to my home. I tried home deliveries and it did not work well at all. I had to deal with an automated phone system, a call center that could not answer questions, and receiving too many of one prescription and not enough of another. I missed friendly human contact and service. I was cooperating in putting someone out of a job. One big danger here is that companies will use this crisis in retail pharmacies to push for privatization of Medicare, and eventually Social Security. I suspect that the companies that are claiming that they can't hire pharmacists and pharmacy techs and closing down pharmacies are chief among those who will benefit from privatized healthcare. 

The Alliance for Retired Americans, Physicians for a National Health Program, the Labor Campaign for Single Payer, and Healthcare for All Oregon are all doing great work around the problems and issues that I am raising here. There are plenty of potential solutions being offered by folks without an economic interest in privatization, market share, and higher prices. 

  

Photo from Democracy Now!