Category:
Drugstores
Region:
USA
State:
Kentucky
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PHARMACY TO CLOSE, MERGE WITH CVS CHAIN
Source: Louisville Courier-Journal
Date: 13-Mar-2007
Author: Martha Elson
The phone rang repeatedly at the Douglass Pharmacy in the Douglass Loop one recent morning, and pharmacist Douglas Antle tried to soothe anxious customers.
"Yes, I know, I'm sorry," Antle said to one caller. "Yes, it was very difficult."
A pharmacy is thought to have operated at the site since 1912, but Antle has decided to merge his apothecary -- which he said has about 1,300 customers -- with the vastly larger CVS pharmacy.
The Douglass Pharmacy and drugstore will close after business Thursday at 2200 Dundee Road in the Belknap neighborhood, and customers' prescription files will be transferred to CVS, 2410 Bardstown Road. Antle, 51, will become a pharmacist at the CVS store.
"We're happy to welcome them," said Jack Lowe, district manager for CVS, whose district office is on Shelbyville Road past Middletown.
But Mary Moss Greenbaum of Highlands-Douglass is sad to see Douglass go. "It's a pure and simple example of the death of Main Street America," she said last week. "I think none of us who live in the Highlands will ever feel about CVS the way we feel about" Douglass.
Merging with CVS "was not an easy decision," Antle said. "I'll miss being on the Douglass Loop. I know the business owners. I know the employees. People walk in here from all walks of life."
In the early to mid-1900s, the Loop was a turnaround for trolleys and streetcars. A Rite Aid pharmacy (formerly a Taylor Drug Store) closed at Douglass Loop at Harvard Drive and Bardstown Road in 1999.
Antle, the Douglass Pharmacy's fourth owner, has owned the business for 17 years and worked there for five when it was owned and run by Richard Meena Sr., who died in April.
Meena's son, Richard Jr., still owns the building, which also contains Horton's Hardware, Breadworks and another small business upstairs. Meena said last week that his family is looking for a tenant to replace the pharmacy.
"I hate to see it go, because it's been a cornerstone of the neighborhood," Meena said.
His father went to work there in 1959, and their family subsequently bought the business and then the building.
Douglass Pharmacy was known for making deliveries, and Meena said it was not unusual for his father or Antle to pick up bread and milk for delivery, too.
Douglass Loop used to have a grocery and meat market, and Antle said he still sends along hardware items with deliveries from Horton's next door.
"I'm sad for the neighborhood," owner Larry Horton said of the pharmacy's departure. "But I totally understand. It's tough making it as an independent business owner. It gets harder all the time."
Coleman Friedman, 89, said he owned the pharmacy from 1952 to 1970 and that the late Joseph Heil owned it before that.
Friedman still works in the pharmacy at the Portland Family Health Center. Friedman and his wife, Ann, who died in 1999, ran the Douglass Pharmacy, which used to have a fountain that was popular with Highland Junior High School (now Highland Middle) students, Friedman said.
He said he was "ready to cry" when he heard the store was closing.
Antle said he wasn't being reimbursed for the full cost of doing business because of Medicare changes last year. "But it's not a dying business," he said.
Greenbaum said she always had her prescriptions delivered and that the store would make a point to order an item if it didn't have it.
"They accommodated the customer," she said.
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