WinnDixie and Eckert drugs to close mucho stores

[donsu]

heard a report yesterday about WinnDixie, and the CNN rolling banner had the Eckert news today.

food and drugs - why are food and drug stores losing money?

WallMart? other competition?

some plan of the drug barons?

???

[rangerfan]

1. Winn Dixie has been in trouble for several years and just

keeps losing ground. I think Eckerds may be suffering from what some of the others are, mail order pharmacy. I just changed from using Eckerds to mail order through my company pharmacy, it's cheaper.

[physioex]

2. Welcome to the Wal-Martization of America....

Pretty soon all there will be left is minimum wage jobs with no benefits with self service checkouts for second rate items... (Man I'm startin to write like Hemingway)

[camero]

3. They were both owned by pretty much the same people

The owner of Winn- Dixie in particular is know in Florida for saying we didn't have to invest in education because we were only training cashiers.

Major Freeps they are

[RebelOne]

4. Just about all the Winn-Dixie stores closed here in North Georgia

about 7 years ago. But there have been several Eckerts just opened in the past year in my neighborhood.

[Ganja Ninja]

5. Eckerd was bought up by CVS recently.

The stores they are closing are probably close to other CVS stores and are redundant.

[starroute]

6. I'd guess strong competition plus bad conceptualization

Look at the fliers you get in your weekly mail -- almost all of them are for either supermarkets or drugstores. Those places are fiercely competitive, very sale-oriented, and go on the thinnest of profit margins. For example, one of my local markets, which had been high-end when it came to prices, now has big signs up outside and on every aisle proclaiming their dedication to bargains. But how long can they survive that way?

And at least from my own experience, drugstores like Eckert have an additional problem. They're big enough to be hard to find things, but not big enough to have a very interesting selection of items. What they do have tends to be crap -- cheap sandals and tacky knick-knacks. They're short of clerks, and those they have don't know the stock very well. And when it comes to prescriptions, the prices are higher and the waiting time longer than the local independent pharmacy that sells nothing but drugs.

Drugstores might do better if they slimmed down a bit -- limited themselves to prescriptions, over-the-counter medications, vitamins, toiletries, and cosmetics -- and left the housewares and such aside. But they'll still be in a high-competititon market, and probably at the mercy of places like Walmart.