An Open Letter to Pharmacy Industry Leaders

Are you part of our health care system, or are you convenience stores?

With slogans like “The Pharmacy America Trusts” and “For All The Ways You Care” it sounds like you really are concerned about your customers’ health, unlike typical convenience stores. Yet if we look at your stores with a critical eye, it seems like pharmacies are selling virtually anything, with little regard for the health of your customers.


The Smoking Gun
Every time a customer steps up to register #1, your prime merchandising spot, there is the proof that pharmacies are promoting their attributes as convenience stores and not concerned about customer wellness. How else to explain the piles of cigarette cartons behind the head of the cashier along with large ads for Marlboros?

Imagine finding cigarettes for sale in your doctor’s office lobby. What message would your doctor be sending? Many neighborhood pharmacies are sending such a message by prominently displaying tobacco products and signage. Instead of focusing on health and wellness, these stores actually promote tobacco use.



Healthy Products And Customer Education Are The Keys To Wellness
Merchants like the pharmacy chains have a huge impact on their customers’ behavior and buying decisions, and pharmacies are the place in our health care system where we spend the most time. If you turned your attention to selling healthier products and educating your customers instead of promoting tobacco, junk food, and alcohol, you would have a substantial impact on our entire health care system.



Our Mission
The mission of HealthyPharmacies.org is to help pharmacies focus their business model on health and wellness through a series of pilot programs proving that wellness is good for customers and good for the stores’ profits too.

Our three-point program for healthy pharmacies is:
1. Help the stores offer in-store customer education programs focused on preventing disease.
2. Help pharmacies display wellness messaging, including warnings about unhealthy products, throughout the stores.
3. Help stores offer a healthier product mix with less emphasis on unhealthy products.


Wellness Is Here to Stay
There’s no better time for pharmacies to drop the convenience store business model. Our entire nation is now focused on health care reform. From President Barack Obama to conservative visionary David Frum to talk show icon Oprah Winfrey, a growing consensus is focusing on lowering health care costs through disease prevention. Pharmacies could lead the movement simply by rolling out comprehensive in-store wellness campaigns and featuring healthier products.

Wellness is here to stay. Disease prevention is the only way to ease the increasing demands and costs of our health care system. Pharmacies need to be a part of the solution, not part of the problem.