A Rite Aid store. Credit: Shutterstock
Rite Aid — one of the "big three" U.S. pharmacy chains — announced this week that it will sell or shut down all of its 1,245 drug stores that are still in operation.
The Philadelphia-based company filed for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey.
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Most of the stores now in operation will "remain open and operating for the next few months," according to a company letter to customers.
The announcement is intensifying worries about the spread of "pharmacy deserts," or places where employees must drive a long distance, walk a long distance or put up with long bus and train rides to get to a brick-and-mortar pharmacy that serves ordinary retail customers.
Awareness of the pharmacy desert problem flared in 2023, when CVS and Walgreens announced a wave of pharmacy closings and Rite Aid filed an earlier petition for Chapter 11 bankruptcy court protection.
Pharmacies have faced growing competition from online pharmacies; ferocious cost-cutting pressure from insurers, employers and pharmacy benefit managers; the enormous variations in demand for drugs and "front of the store products" caused by the COVID-19 pandemic; and the impact of the COVID-related shift to work from home on where people shop.
The United States has 60,000 retail pharmacies.
A team led by Dr. Walter Mathis, a Yale University medical professor, recently estimated that 18% of the U.S. population, or 61 million people, live in pharmacy deserts and that 30 million, or 8.9%, live in places served by just one pharmacy.
Related: 5 worst U.S. pharmacy deserts
If the Mathis team calculations are correct, 8.9% of the Rite Aid stores serve the people with just one pharmacy, and most of the remaining Rite Aid stores become something other than pharmacies, 100 of the 5,300 pharmacies serving places with just one pharmacy will shut down. That would increase the number of people living in pharmacy deserts by 1.6%, or about 570,000.
Many employers already offer workers access to prescriptions through mail-order pharmacies operated by drugstore chains, pharmacy benefit managers or other entities.
Amazon and other companies sell drugs online.
But Mathis noted that loss of access to a brick-and-mortar pharmacy can be hard on a patient who needs advice from a pharmacist or who has problems with using the internet.
Loss of access to brick-and-mortar drug stores may also cost workers access to a source of other necessities of life, such as diapers, bandages and suntan lotion.
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Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
