FIFE — Pharmacy technician Kelly Rutt saw the day coming five years ago when Fife Pharmacy and Gifts, where she had worked for nearly a quarter of a century, would no longer be a viable business.
Insurance company and government prescription drug reimbursements were dropping, big discount chains were selling generic medications for $4 and even Fife Pharmacy and Gifts’ most loyal customers were under the gun from their insurance companies to order their prescriptions by mail.
“Certainly in the last three years, the question became clear: It wasn’t whether we would continue in business, but how much time we had left,” she said last week.
Rutt now knows the answer. Fife’s last drug store will close its doors Dec. 15.
When the doors are locked then, not only will Rutt and 11 other employees lose their jobs, but a community institution will end an 87-year run.
The store had no alternatives, owner Dave Morio said. “It’s been getting ugly out there for some time,” he said.
Morio sold a seaside vacation home and a rental property to keep the business going, but in the end, no infusion of cash would alter the unpleasant realties: in the present economic climate, the store was losing money.
“I considered closing last year, but it concerned me that I’d be putting so many people out of work at a terrible time in the economy,” Morio said. “But there is nothing more I can do now to keep it going.”
In addition to the layoffs, the store’s closing means an end of about $6,000 a month in building rental income to the Sowders family, which still owns the pharmacy building at 5303 Pacific Highway E.
The Sowders founded the original drug store, Fife Pharmacy, in 1923 and operated it through 1985, when Morio bought the business.
That original business survived the Depression and two major tragedies. The original pharmacy burned to the ground in 1929. An electrical fault in adjacent building started the fire, and winds spread the flames to the pharmacy building, said Lori Sowders-Witt, granddaughter of founders Ernie and Linnea Sowders.
Ernie and Linnea built a new store at the present location. It was two stories, with medical offices and an apartment where the family lived for several years.
Fire struck again in 1958 when a blaze broke out on the second floor. That fire ultimately was traced to a sterilizer in a doctor’s office, said Sowders-Witt, who recenlty moved to California.
The blaze totaled the building. The family built a single-story structure to replace it, and that opened seven months later.
Ernie and Linnea’s son, Bob, joined the family business in 1947 as a pharmacist. He and his wife, Maxine, took over the store in 1963 when Bob’s dad retired.
Morio went to work for Bob and Maxine Sowders in 1980 as a pharmacist with the idea that he’d eventually buy the business.
Sowders-Witt, her siblings Jan Miller and Greg Sowders, and her father are the family partnership that still owns the building and are now responsible for insurance and property taxes without a revenue stream.
Bob Sowders “is very sad. He was hoping he wouldn’t live long enough to see” the building close, Sowders-Witt said.
“The reason he held on to the building was that he hoped it would be a safety net for his kids when times were tough,” she said. “Now times are tough, and it won’t be a safety net. It will be a burden.”
Under both the Sowders and Morio, the pharmacy generated a steady business from several doctors in town and from nearby occupational medicine clinics that served workers on the Tacoma Tideflats, Morio said.
But the doctors eventually closed or moved their practices, and the clinics shut down. Fife has no doctors’ offices now.
The store had always sold other items beyond prescription drugs; at one time it even had a soda fountain. After the doctors offices closed, the Sowders and Morio enhanced the cards and gifts selection.
As insurance reimbursements shrunk, the gift business oftentimes generated more profit than the pharmacy, Morio said.
The size of those drug reimbursements is controlled nationwide in large part by three pharmacy benefit management companies. Those companies have huge power by virtue of the size of their client bases. For independent drug stores, who have little leverage to negotiate larger reimbursements, the results have been devastating, Morio said.
“I filled a prescription yesterday that cost us $569 to buy. The insurance company will give us $570 and some odd cents for that prescription,” he said.
On Wednesday, Rutt was preparing a prescription that cost Fife Pharmacy and Gifts $20.99. The drugstore will receive a reimbursement from the state of Washington for that prescription of $20.71.
“You can’t do many of those,” said Rutt. “Not only do we not get our full costs for the drugs, but we receive nothing for my time, our overhead and the packaging.”
For the pharmacy’s loyal customers, the store’s closing is akin to the passing of a treasured friend.
“I find it really, really sad,” said Kelly Rettko, whose family has been a Fife Pharmacy and Gifts customer for 16 years. “They know about our family and we know about theirs. We consider Dave and Kelly and the others to be friends.”
Fife Milton Edgewood Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Aaron Williams said it’s a “sad state of affairs” when a business such as Fife Pharmacy and Gifts is forced to close.
“They’re a real asset,” he said. “They’re part of the fabric of the community.”
Perhaps most distressing is that the passing of such a community institution is another symptom of the depersonalization of business, Williams said.
Sowders-Witt said her parents and grandparents considered the drugstore not just a means to support their families but as a service for the community.
The family kept the store open every day of the year including Easter and Christmas.
“The Sowders’ belief was it did not matter what day of the year it was, someone was going to need help, and they were going to be available to provide it,” she said.
Her father would often reopen the store after hours if a customer needed a prescription urgently, she said.
The store also provided residents with a satellite post office with box rentals, stamps and package mailing. The post office wasn’t a big money-maker, said Morio, but it built traffic and was a service to the community.
Morio is moving himself and the store’s prescriptions to the Milton Safeway pharmacy, several miles away.
Sowders-Witt is putting the building on the rental market, hoping that another pharmacy or retailer will find the location attractive. She’s approached several regional pharmacies, but none has signed a lease.
Data from the National Community Pharmacists Association shows about 23,000 privately owned, community pharmacies nationwide, with 362 in Washington state.
Spokesman John Norton said those numbers have held steady since even before the recession began.
“People always need someplace to get prescriptions,” he said.
But Morio said he fears that independent drug stores like his are a fast-dying breed.
“You can count the number of independent pharmacies in the Tacoma area on one hand,” said Morio. “And, if conditions don’t change, I suspect more of them will be giving up the business in the future.”
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Information from: The News Tribune, http://www.thenewstribune.com
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