Content about Opinion

I know this older guy at my gym — I call him “The Professor,” mostly because he used to teach journalism, but also because it’s more fun to say and easier to remember than his actual name. He’s 85 now, and he says if he doesn’t get to the club to swim laps and sit in the steam room at least three times a week, he feels like he’s doing something wrong. He says he feels the same way about flu shots and all vaccinations for that matter.



Somewhere along the road back from Boston, DSN publisher Wayne Bennett and I looked at each other and realized that the previous 24 hours or so had been some of the most productive time we had enjoyed at a trade show in quite a while. To be honest, that’s not exactly what we had expected when we headed to the National Association of Chain Drug Stores’ Pharmacy and Technology Conference a day earlier. Hurricane Irene — which had already dampened our travel plans — also had dampened our expectations.



One thing that was pretty clear in the research we conducted for the 2011 Retail Clinician Reader Survey is that an increasing number of retail-based health practitioners want the clinics they work for to expand the scope of services beyond acute care. Many readers said the one thing that would make them even more satisfied about the work they do is “moving beyond sick care,” as one reader noted, to more preventive/wellness-oriented services, including chronic disease management programs for diabetes, hypertension and more.

Neither one of the co-
recipients of this year’s Fantle Award would want you to call it the end of an era. 


Sugar and chalk. That’s what Pfizer researchers found in a pill that was supposed to be Cytotec, but was, in fact, a crude knockoff seized from a counterfeit drug lab in Peru.

It’s about 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday. I usually wait a couple more days to write my column, but I don’t need to think any more about what to write.

My first insights into retailing came to me by way of my great aunt Agatha Mastromatteo-Corsello-Langella at the boutique she owned just off the corner of 72nd Street and Broadway, here in New York City. As I write this now, it has been less than three hours since she passed away in the company of her two sons Michael and Glen.



It appears that even the “King of All Media” Howard Stern gets his news from Drug Store News. Traffic on the site spiked in late December when a DrugStoreNews.com story made it into Stern sidekick Robin Quivers’ daily news broadcast during the Thursday, Dec. 16 show. The Stern Web page also linked to the story under the “It’s Time for Robin’s News” section in the rundown for the satellite radio program’s show (“Use lanolin on your cracked nipples” at HowardStern.com/Rundown.hs).


We’re making big changes around here in 2011 — and we’re doing it because you told us to.


Whenever we ask one of our readers what they want from Drug Store News, inevitably, the answer always is: “Tell me something I don’t already know about.”


That’s the problem with most trade magazines today — by the time you get the issue, it’s all old news; often more than a month old by the time it lands on your desk. 


As this issue went to press, it sure had been a busy week here at Drug Store News. And that means it was a busy week for the industry, too.

As I write this column, it’s the final Super Tuesday primaries in eight states, including here in New York, before the big mid-term elections in November. And if the Sunday morning news shows are right, the Democrats are in for a spanking. Given the present state of the economy, the stagnant job market and the American electorate’s need to find someone to blame, it’s really kind of inevitable.

Over-the-counter and health-and-beauty care marketers have been struggling to find ways to harness the communication power of pharmacy to help them build their brand equity. The path to achieve this goal has been for consumer packaged goods companies to develop pharmacy programs designed to educate and capture the attention of pharmacists so that pharmacists may communicate and educate their patients about their products at the point of decision-making.

Dear Editor,

Upon reading your June 7 cover story, “7 Deadly Sins of SKU Rationalization,” we at The Swanson Group/Mack Elevation Forum have identified 10 ways that a small- or mid-sized vendor can avoid being SKU-rationalized. Respectfully, we have offered them for fellow Drug Store News readers.