Big conglomerates or go without!
–https://finance.yahoo.com/news/crisis-hitting-local-drugstore-why-102500058.html
Bartell’s, as everybody calls it in Seattle, was passed down from father to son to grandchildren over 130 years before the Bartell family sold it to Rite Aid in 2020. By then, the business had 67 locations, annual revenues of $550 million, and the title of the country’s oldest family-owned pharmacy. Even today, walking into one of the roughly 40 remaining Bartell’s feels like entering a time portal to the days of soda fountains and the neighborhood pharmacist who knew your kids’ names and the dates of their last colds: friendly clerks, folksy signs, aisles full of toys and chocolates. “Bartell’s has always been more than a drugstore,” one of many columnists lamenting its fate recently wrote. “It is part of the fabric of Seattle.”
And now it’s dying. Rite Aid declared bankruptcy in October, and since then it has said it will close more than 520 stores. The casualties include a third of the Bartell Drugs locations in the region, one of which was the last 24-hour pharmacy operated by any company in downtown Seattle: Today, anyone who wakes up in the middle of the night seeking cold medicine, or help for a child with an ear infection, has to go to an emergency room or drive to another neighborhood. . . .
It’s a microcosm of a crisis that extends far beyond the Pacific Northwest. American drugstores are caught in a perfect storm of factors: The wide-ranging retail apocalypse has made it more difficult than ever for brick-and-mortar businesses, with their expensive rents and staffing costs and post-pandemic fears about retail crime, to compete with Amazon and other low-overhead online sellers. For pharmacies in particular, the grim shadow of the opioid crisis has saddled the large chains with lawsuits and multibillion-dollar settlements, while overworked and burned-out pharmacists are fleeing the industry in droves. Meanwhile, they say the health insurance companies that decide how much pharmacies actually get paid have been tightening the screws, inexorably reducing their reimbursements for prescriptions.
“Pharmacies are in shambles. It’s unbelievable what’s happening right now,” says Abdikadir Athur, a pharmacist who spent six years at Bartell’s and then Rite Aid before cofounding a small pharmacy, Tukwila Station, in the Seattle suburb of SeaTac.
He adds: “If even big chains cannot survive—and even CVS and Walgreens are hurting—what do you expect for the small pharmacies?”
-Yahoo Finance, Ibid.
I warned you about this.
Jerome Powell has already made it clear that, in this downturn / collapse, the “too big to fail” institutions will be just fine; the banks that will fail will be small to medium regional banks. What do you think is the case for businesses in general?
“Small business used to define America’s economy. The pandemic could change that forever.
More than 100,000 small businesses have closed forever as the nation’s pandemic toll escalates”
Remember: during the shutdowns/lockdowns, the huge corporations were allowed to operate while mom & pop shops had to close.
“Small businesses are credited with just under two-thirds (63%) of the new jobs created from 1995 to 2021.”
–https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/state-of-small-business-now
What happens if that number is absolutely steamrolled? The bottom line is that, without competition, these huge companies can do whatever the hell they want. They pretty much already do. As Gordon Gekko asked Bud Fox, “Ninety percent of the American people have little or no net worth. I create nothing; I own. We make the rules, Buddy, the news, war, peace, famine, upheaval; the cost of a paper clip. We pull the rabbit out of the hat while everybody else sits around their whole life wondering how we did it… you’re not naïve enough to think we’re living in a democracy are you, Buddy?”
Want to bank? Go to a big box bank and use CBDCs.
Want a job? Go to a huge corporation and jump through their poodle hoops and hope you get hired.
–https://thejobmarketjournal.com/f/the-targeting-of-smalls-mids
These things are not happening by accident!