Going to be a nice couple of days in the forecast so getting the yard ready for spring. Mow and clean up. Coffee and breakfast first and then see what is being sold at today's auction.
Sad bit of news, Camano Island's only Pharmacy is closing today after 35 years. From the Stanwood Camano News:
Camano Island's only pharmacy set to close March 2
Mark Phibbs greets customer after customer with his trademark smile and tells them the sad news.
“We held on as long as we could,” he tells one of about 200 customers a day that walks through the doors of Mark’s Camano Pharmacy in the Camano Plaza.
Come 2 p.m. Saturday, March 2, Phibbs will close the doors on the only pharmacy on Camano Island, becoming yet another in a long list of independent pharmacies across the nation to shutter in the past decade.
And the reason is a very common one:
A key factor among the many changes in the industry is reimbursement rates for drugs. Insurers often reimburse independent pharmacies less than what they paid for the drugs, or large insurers decide to cut ties with smaller operations entirely, according to the Independent Pharmacy Association.
That means customers are faced with the choice of paying full price at an independent pharmacy or going elsewhere where their insurance will help cover the costs.
The rise in mail-order prescriptions also has taken a toll.
“The saddest part to me is the rise of mail order because of the low price for people, which you can’t blame them, but then they come here for advice, which, of course, I give,” Phibbs said. “But I can’t stay in business just giving advice.”
Big business screwing over the small guy. Mail order too - I ran into that when I opened my computer store. I had a run of about six years of great sales and then Dell opened their (figurative) doors. I would get people come in to talk about a computer they were interested in - I would spend 45 minutes educating them. Then I would not see them again until a few months later when they came in to ask about something on their new Dell computer. I would state that my shop time was $25 (this was in 1985). They would sputter and say that I had been so generous with my time before.
Finally developed a tactic - when someone would come in and start to pump me for information, I would tell them that I had a great two-hour class that covered all of this and it was only $75 and came with a book (PC's for Dummies). Number of people taking the class? Zero. I switched over to desktop publishing, copies and printing and had a great run of another six years before I was hired by MSFT.
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