Independent drugstores bring some relief to pharmacy deserts

Independent drugstores are opening in rural areas that large chains have abandoned. “The big-box stores came into smaller and smaller communities, and they, in essence, outcompeted all the other pharmacies in the area,” said David Zgarrick, a pharmacy professor at Northeastern University. “Now they’re completely gone and with them the pharmacy services and everything else they provided. They left a vacuum in a lot of these places.”