Good morning, Broadsheet readers! AI company Humane seeks a sale, a new social media platform for artists gained more than 600,000 users in the past week, and Fortune senior features writer Maria Aspan digs into the great American pharmacy meltdown. Have a relaxing weekend!
- Drugstore disasters. American pharmacies are facing a national crisis—as you may have noticed at your local drugstore.
Pharmacists are overworked and fleeing the industry. Big chains are closing hundreds of stores and responding to retail crime fears by locking up the deodorant. Meanwhile, the small independent pharmacies trying to serve their local communities are getting forced out of business as their margins for filling prescriptions get squeezed. For the new issue of Fortune, I dug into why this is all happening, as seen through the story of Bartell’s, a beloved—and slowly dying—Seattle drugstore now owned by Rite Aid.
Even the gender dynamics of the industry’s C-suite are reflecting this turmoil: At the start of 2023, all three big retail pharmacy chains were led by women. But then Heyward Donigan left Rite Aid, months before it filed for bankruptcy protection, and Walgreens parted ways with Roz Brewer. Both companies are now run by men, leaving only CVS Health’s Karen Lynch at the top of a major retail pharmacy. (CVS, which also owns insurer Aetna and many other large health care businesses, is No. 6 on this year’s Fortune 500 and inarguably doing the best of all the big retail pharmacy chains. But even it is closing stores, and has seen its share price fall about 15% in the past year.)
All of the industry’s problems are particularly visible in Seattle, a wealthy city that has nevertheless seen dozens of pharmacies close in the past year. The epicenter of these shutdowns is Bartell’s, a 130-year-old family business that sold to Rite Aid in 2020 and that locals call “part of the fabric of Seattle.” Since Rite Aid filed for bankruptcy protection in October, it’s closed a third of Bartell’s 67 locations—including the last 24-hour pharmacy operated by any company in downtown Seattle.
“The situation is now very urgent,” Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington told me. “When you take a pharmacy out of a neighborhood, and they no longer have that in their community, it’s a real problem.”
Over the past several months, I spoke with dozens of pharmacists, executives, lawmakers, analysts, workers, customers, and others to explain what’s happening in Seattle and across the nation.
As Jacqueline Eide, a pharmacist who spent 15 years at Bartell’s and who now owns a pharmacy in the rural Washington town of Goldendale, summarizes the ongoing, industry-wide disaster: “Everybody knows we’re broken.”
Read my full story here.
Maria Aspan
maria.aspan@fortune.com
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