Retail theft is jeopardizing access to pharmacists

All around us, the pharmacy landscape is changing rapidly. Rite-Aid is working through bankruptcy. Walgreens just announced closure of up to 25% of its stores. Winn-Dixie pharmacies are gone. The National Community Pharmacists Association indicates in verbal communications that one independent pharmacy and three community pharmacies are closing every single day in 2024. Much has been said and written about the impact of PBMs on these closures, but I want to speak to another culprit impacting decisions to close pharmacies: retail theft.

Our profession can no longer ignore retail theft or push it off as a simple cost of doing business. Retail theft in today’s world is sophisticated, and—in major metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington DC, and New York—is led by organized crime rings. A New York Magazine investigative article published in March 2024 describes the problem in great detail. If you think this isn’t an issue you should care about, take this real story from my recent travels.

In Boston, there is a community pharmacy in an upper middle-class neighborhood dispensing over five hundred prescriptions a day, consistently administering several hundred vaccine doses a week, and has well-managed third-party contracts. The pharmacist is adept at inventory management and—despite the cuts to reimbursements—the pharmacy is profitable. However, in 2023, theft of front-end items from every conceivable shelf in the store has now totaled in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The staff of the pharmacy have to work for 10 full months to regain the revenue of the stolen merchandise. Think about it: going to work in a pharmacy and working hard to be profitable, only to have your profits eliminated and your coworkers realize they are working hard every day for essentially nothing—for 10 months out of the year. That’s demotivating. It’s no wonder hiring in today’s world is difficult.

It is also dangerous.

Criminals engaging in mass retail theft are brazen, sometimes threatening and even physically harming workers. It’s no longer safe to be a cashier at a retail store—including a community pharmacy. As large corporations are downsizing and pharmacy owners are making decisions about locations to close, the amount of “shrinkage” or retail theft occurring at a given location is increasingly part of the equation. Many closures wind up happening in communities where there is no other pharmacy access. It’s heartbreaking. The selfishness and desperation of criminals is leaving many communities without access to critical health care services provided by pharmacists. For that reason alone, pharmacists must care about retail theft and work toward solutions.

For those pharmacists who are victims of retail theft, you may have to turn to online pharmacies to provide access to medications to your patients; however, this is not a solution without room for error. The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) reports that nearly 95% of websites offering prescription-only drugs online operate illegally. Through collaborative work with the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies and its partners, APhA encourages our members and all consumers to be diligent in only purchasing merchandise of any type from reputable sellers—and not through online sources that may be reselling stolen merchandise. If you or your patients choose to purchase online, then I encourage you to use NABP’s safe online pharmacy verification tool to ensure you aren’t purchasing stolen or fake merchandise!

One last item to consider is the importance of getting to know your local law enforcement officials. Invite them into your practices and learn how they can best support your pharmacy. We also encourage student pharmacists to work with schools and colleges of pharmacy in partnership with local law enforcement to have training sessions on workplace safety in community settings. Being alert and learning how to stay safe when a theft is in progress is essential.

For every pharmacist, for all of pharmacy.