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Thursday, May 16, 2013

What's happening at Ocean Pharmacy?

We search the Tubes of the Interwebs to bring you hot info!
Soon to have a new sign? Or something else?
by Tom Ferrio

I was kickin' back with Facebook yesterday, checking on my peeps, when up pops the following: "Ocean Pharmacy in Charlestown is turning into CVS in a few weeks". 

Whoa!

Despite the lighthearted introduction, this is not a joke. Read on for more details.

Facebook is not normally the place to find authoritative news. I regularly see people posting appeals to help find lost children when a quick news search shows the child was lost and found years earlier. Other eye-opening posts are quickly discredited with a visit to snopes.com.

But this post was followed up with over a dozen comments and many of them give credible details and talk about current employees who are leaving because of the impending change.

But something just doesn't seem right...

Having been in many CVS stores and being a patron of Ocean Pharmacy my first reaction was that Ocean Pharmacy is simply not big enough for a CVS store. One of the comments said that CVS did not buy the building and is only leasing the space. So they're not going to tear it down and build a bigger "box." That wouldn't be easy in Charlestown anyway.

Then I got thinking about what happened with the Tim Hortons. Hmmmm. After they closed, a group of Dunkin Donuts owners bought them up and are now just sitting on the empty buildings. They decided that would be more profitable than letting another coffee shop move in.

So I can imagine a scheme where CVS buys the business, gets all the prescriptions transferred, and then decides to close the space and sit on it until Charlestown residents get used to driving to Westerly or Wakefield to visit a drug store.

Is that too cynical?

I think we will learn more soon.