RSS: What's one more drug store?
Spend an extended amount of time in this area and notice certain trends emerge.
Not too long ago, there was the supermarket shuffle. Festival Foods came and elbowed their way into an already crowded supermarket sector, filling a void left by Cub Foods closing up shop on Northland Avenue. With Copps, Pick 'N Save, Walmart, Piggly Wiggly, Woodman's and other grocery stores all aiming for a piece of the figurative pie, I was convinced one of them would go down. Ultimately, that didn't happen.
Next genre up for super-saturation? The drug stores. We've recently witnessed the advent of the ShopKo Express, compact little stores that look like the lovechild of a ShopKo and a Walgreens. Two just recently opened their doors, one serving the East College Avenue corridor off Highway 441 and the other nestled behind the park-and-ride off Highway 41 and Ballard. Folks who frequent ShopKo will feel right at home, to be certain, with all the look and feel of a ShopKo. One supposed benefit would be the ability to run in for a bottle of NyQuil without the risk of leaving with a pair of new shoes and new dining room set.
Across the street from the ShopKo on Northland Avenue, demolition is almost complete on the site of a future Walgreens location, down the road from an existing Walgreens. On the south side, a brand spanking new CVS Pharmacy is poised to open, casting its shadow on the empty shell of a Ford Pharmacy, relatively new itself.
Let it never be said that a prescription is hard to fill in this area. Now if we could only convince one of the drug store chains to build one on the old, dilapidated K-Mart property on College Avenue...
Re: What's one more drug store?
Sorry for the double post....
Re: What's one more drug store?
I think the reason why you see less cars at Shopko Express is because they have less wait times. Every time I went to Walgreens with a new prescription, it took a minimum of a half-hour. Even if it was a tube of something that they just needed to put in a bag. I went to Shopko and they entered me as new into the computers, filled my prescription, and matched Walmart's pricing (without me asking) in 5 minutes. It's an excellent store with friendly workers.
Re: What's one more drug store?
I think the reason why you see less cars at Shopko Express is because they have less wait times. Every time I went to Walgreens with a new prescription, it took a minimum of a half-hour. Even if it was a tube of something that they just needed to put in a bag. I went to Shopko and they entered me as new into the computers, filled my prescription, and matched Walmart's pricing (without me asking) in 5 minutes. It's an excellent store with friendly workers.
Drug stores on every block
A Walgreens on every block is pretty common in larger cities, so it's not surprising that we're seeing it here.
The new ShopKo Express store in Darboy does offer a few things that Walgreens doesn't:
-They sell prescription eyeglasses
-They have a medical clinic onsite
-The offer a decent selection of beer and wine
We switched a couple of prescriptions from Walgreens to ShopKo Express because the store is more convenient to where we live and they gave us a $25 ShopKo giftcard for doing it. But I drive by the SkopKo Express in Darboy every day and they don't seem to ever have any where near the number of cars in their parking lot that the nearby Walgreens does, so I'm not sure how long they'll be in business. (I can also recommend the ShopKo Express prescription eyeglass service too- decent prices and quick service.)
I am somewhat disappointed in the transformation over the last few years of Darboy from a community on the outskirts of Appleton into a typical city suburb, but it beats the alternative- I lived in a small town in Wisconsin for a couple of years that had a bunch of zoning laws in place that prohibited almost any new businesses from opening and it was a pain having to drive 10 miles or more each way in order to go out to eat at a decent restaurant or 20 miles each way to shop at a competitively priced grocery store.
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