The Competition Bureau of Canada has approved the sale of Rexall in Sechelt to Rx Drug Mart Inc. (RXDM) and the changeover is expected to take place next month.
It will be the second time the drug store in Trail Bay Mall has changed hands in the past three years.
Originally set up as a Shoppers Drug Mart, the Competition Bureau of Canada ruled in March 2014 that Shoppers had to be divested because its parent company, Loblaw, owned too much of the market place with both Extra Foods and Shoppers in Sechelt.
Rexall was approved to take over operations in December 2014; however, in March 2016, McKesson Canada Corporation acquired the Rexall chain and that caused the Competition Bureau to take another look.
In December 2016 the Competition Bureau ruled that because McKesson is the largest pharmaceutical distributor in North America, its taking over of the Sechelt Rexall would likely “result in a substantial lessening and/or prevention of competition” in Sechelt.
For that reason it was once again decided that the Sechelt drug store would have to be divested.
This month the Competition Bureau put out a press release naming Rx Drug Mart Inc. as the new buyer.
“RXDM has the managerial, operational and financial capacity to compete effectively,” the press release stated.
Founded in 2015 and based in Toronto, RXDM is a fairly new player in the pharmacy world and looking to acquire more stores.
While the company is only two years old, executives with RXDM have over 100 years experience with other stores like Shoppers Drug Mart and Rexall and the company pitches itself as a “pharmacy preservation society.”
“Born from an idea that the business of retail pharmacy was being driven by large corporate entities operating in their best interest, the team at Rx Drug Mart established a pharmacy retail organization that brought the priority back to the pharmacy, the patient and the community,” the RXDM website states.
Staff at the Rexall in Sechelt are eager to work with the new company, which has assured all employees they will keep their jobs, according to Rexall manager Jen Chou. “The earliest concern RX Drug Mart had was just letting everybody know that yes, absolutely, their job is secure,” Chou said. “So we’re quite excited about it. It’s hopefully happening kind of mid-July.”
Although exact dates haven’t been nailed down yet, the changeover is expected to have less impact on customers than the switch from Shoppers to Rexall a few years ago.
“That’s mainly because when Shoppers pulled out they had so many exclusive brands and a highly developed private brand program that it was like half the store had to be pulled apart,” Chou said.
“But with Rexall switching to RX Drug Mart, I’d say almost 95 per cent of everything is going to stay the same. The only thing that’s switching over is the Rexall brand stuff is switching over to a brand called Atoma, which the Guardian and IDAs already carry. Aside from that, the intention is for virtually everything else to stay the same.”
People who fill prescriptions at Rexall will have their prescriptions and health information moved over to RXDM’s system automatically.
Chou said the store’s rebranding should take place at night and not disturb patrons. “Really, they’re just going to do some painting and most of that will be done overnight through that whole period of the switch over. We’ll be closing early on the day that we actually do the legal hand off, but aside from that, the rest should be business as usual,” he said.
He hopes to keep the food sale prices customers have come to expect and said he’ll work to that end with the new company. “Obviously we have a pretty busy foods section and RX Drug Mart’s not going to have a lot of structure for that, so my intention, from my personal end, is to try to hold over most of the sale prices that we currently run now, so our milk prices won’t change, our egg prices shouldn’t change much and we’ll run our cheap butter that we run every couple of weeks,” Chou said.
“Realistically it should be very much the same.”
