Bartell Drugs location shutters doors in Everett
Published 5:30 am Wednesday, July 9, 2025
EVERETT — For customer Kathy Lee, the closing of Bartell Drugs on Hoyt Avenue was more than losing a convenient drugstore. It was also the loss of John Sontra, a pharmacist known for his extraordinary customer service.
“He would drop everything to help you,” Lee said.
Lee said the pharmacist’s vast knowledge of medicines and drug interactions made her feel that she was in safe hands. She has been a customer of the pharmacy and Sontra since the early 1990s.
“He treated you like you were a member of his family,” she said.
Rite Aid, the parent company of the Bartell Drugs, closed the Everett store and least five other locations in Snohomish County in the latest restructuring move in a series of bankruptcies. Monday was the last day in Everett for Sontra and five other employees.
Rite Aid officials informed Sontra seven weeks ago that his store was not going to survive.
Sontra said he will miss his customers.
“Being here for so long, I really have just enjoyed helping out a third generation of customers,”Sontra said as he waited on his last customers at the store on Monday. “It’s a total joy to have consistent clients, get to know them, and help them with their health care needs.”
Soon after graduating from pharmacy school at the University of Washington in 1979, Sontra joined the Faulkner Pharmacy on the main campus of the Everett Clinic, the predecessor to Optum Health. The building moved to its present location in Founders Hall in 1986. In 2000, the Everett Clinic bought the pharmacy, operating it until 2013, when it was purchased by Bartell Drugs.
Sontra worked over 46 years as a pharmacist at the Hoyt Avenue location, filling more than 1,200 prescriptions a week, more than other neighborhood pharmacies.
Nobody told Sontra why CVS or another chain didn’t choose to pick up the Bartell location in Everett. Sontra said there was no room for the assorted merchandise, such as food, toilet paper and bottles of shampoo, that other pharmacies sell at a profit while customers pick up their prescriptions.
A Rite Aid spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
Lee said Optum should acquire the pharmacy which served as a convenient place to get your prescription filled, making it easier for seniors like her to fill prescriptions after doctor visits.
Melvyn Trenor, a dentist who practices in Everett, also said Optum should take over the pharmacy as a service to patients and the community.
He said the pharmacy and Sontra have been “an essential element of our community.” An on-campus pharmacy inside the Optum Clinic made it easier for those who were sick or disabled with walkers and wheelchairs to get their medicine right after their doctor’s visit, he said.
“I practice just a few blocks away and I could just pop over and ask him a medication question or maybe he would pick up the phone or I would send my patients over,” Trenor said. “We had a really good working relationship over the years and I trusted him implicitly.”
Trenor said other medical colleagues of his would regularly consult Sontra, who was willing to do original research to help determine the effectiveness of a medication.
“He is very highly respected, I couldn’t say enough good about him,’”Trenor said.
Officials at Optum Health, which is owned by United Health Care, did not return emails seeking comment.
The Bartell Drugs on Hoyt Avenue wasn’t the only casualty from Rite Aid.
Regulatory filings show that Rite Aid closed another store on Evergreen Way without finding a buyer on Jun 30, just a half mile or so from the Holt Avenue Bartell Drugs store in Everett.
Another Bartell Drugs in the Silver Lake section of Everett on 19th Avenue Southeast also closed on Monday, the same day at the Hoyt Avenue store.
In January 2024, Rite Aid closed the Bartell Drugs on Broadway in Everett, which followed other closures in 2023 in Everett and Snohomish County.
In June, a Rite Aid store on Mukilteo Speedway in Mukilteo also stopped doing business without a new buyer.
Two more Bartell Drugs pharmacies in Snohomish and Stanwood are scheduled to close in late August.
Some stores will have new lives.
A spokesperson for drug store chain CVS said it is planning to acquire other Bartell Drug stores in Lynnwood, Everett, Marysville and the Rite Aid stores in Stanwood and in Arlington.
“The transactions have not closed yet and are subject to applicable regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions”, said CVS spokesperson Amy Thibault.
The closures and sales to CVS will mean the end of the Rite Aid, which is based in Philadelphia, and Bartell Drugs, which was founded in Seattle.
Bartell Drugs was a family-owned pharmacy chain that dated back to 1890 until Rite Aid announced had purchased it in 2020 for $95 million.
Rite Aid first filed for bankruptcy in October 2023 after its ran up debt of close to $4 billion.
It reorganized and emerged from the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process in September 2024, closing around 500 of its 1,700 locations nationwide and reducing its debt by $2 billion.
In May, Rite Aid filed for bankruptcy again, saying it was still facing more financial challenges including the inability to obtain merchandise and non-prescription drugs from vendors without paying cash upfront.
The closure of Bartell Drugs on Hoyt Avenue doesn’t mean the end for Sontra. Once CVS assumes ownership of the Rite Aid store in Arlington, Sontra will work there as a pharmacist.
He looks forward to meeting new customers and doctors though he calls the move “bittersweet.” Sontra said the store’s last day on Monday in Everett was particularly emotional with so many goodbyes.
When he begins working further north, one former customer, Kathy Lee, won’t be far behind.
“I’m going to follow John to Arlington,” she said.
Randy Diamond: 425-339-3097; randy.diamond@heraldnet.com.
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