America is Losing Its Pharmacies
- 8 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Walgreens has quietly closed at least 18 stores this year across 11 states and Washington DC, and expects to shut about 100 before the year is out. That sounds like a rounding error for a chain with 8,500 locations. It is not. It is one visible piece of the largest collapse in the history of American retail pharmacy.
Here is the full picture. Walgreens' 100 closures this year are part of a plan to shut roughly 1,200 stores over three years. Rite Aid, once the third-largest chain in the country, went bankrupt twice, closed its final stores in October 2025, and no longer exists as a physical pharmacy at all, roughly 1,250 locations gone. CVS closed about 900 between 2022 and 2024, then another 270 after that. Add it up and America has lost somewhere north of 2,000 net pharmacy locations in about five years.
Nearly 50 million Americans, about 1 in 7, now live in what researchers call a pharmacy desert, an area with little or no reasonable access to a pharmacy. Dr. Dima Qato and her team at the University of South Carolina found that people living in these deserts have measurably worse cardiovascular health and are less likely to take the medications they were prescribed. That smiling pharmacist two minutes from your house is not just a convenience. For a lot of people, they are the difference between taking a heart medication and skipping it.
So why doesn't someone just open a pharmacy where the big chains left? People would love to. A neighborhood pharmacy in an underserved town is a genuinely good business that the community is begging for. The problem is that running one profitably right now is nearly impossible, and that is not bad luck. It is built into the system.
One pharmacy owner in Kansas told investigators that 80% of her prescriptions were reimbursed below what she paid for the drug. She was losing money on four of every five scripts she filled. No business survives selling most of its inventory below cost.
The same conglomerates that own the insurers also own the PBMs that set those reimbursements, and they own giant mail-order pharmacies too. Every independent that gets starved out is a customer they can funnel into their own mail order, where they charge whatever they want and bury it inside your premiums and copays so you never see the markup. The pharmacy desert is not a side effect they regret. For them, it is the goal.
That is exactly why we fired them. No PBM sets our reimbursement, so no PBM can starve us out of business. We do not play the spread game. We charge fair, transparent prices you can actually see.
Head to forestparkpharmacy.com, look at the price checker, and transfer today to save.
See ya.
