Family Pharmacy Plus on South Transit Street closed for good on Oct. 23. The owner, Tim Gallegos, said the closing was his choice entirely.
“I could’ve stayed in, but I went to a funeral last March and it was in Portland, Oregon. All my siblings and family were there and 90% of them were retired. So, they were doing things in Portland, then going to Dallas to do things. And I had to get back to work,” he said.
“At that time I had just turned 70 in February, and at that time I decided I was done. I was going to figure out my escape.”
Gallegos said the market is good for pharmacies; in fact he had hoped another independent pharmacy would buy his inventory, instead of him selling it to the Rite Aid chain.
“We wanted to give it to an independent, but they were scared,” Gallegos said.
Gallegos said went to pharmacy school but it wasn’t his first choice as a career path.
A friend had recommended he try to get into dental school, and when he took the test, he said, he scored 5% below the minimum for admission.
He didn’t know it, but that was actually a good score on his first try.
Gallegos started his career as a pharmacist working at independent pharmacies, and later moved on to working for chains in the Lockport area. He said he didn’t like pharmacies, though, so he started taking computer classes as a launchpad to a different line of work.
The industry wasn’t ready to let him go, though.
Gallegos kept getting calls to “moonlight” at different independent stores until he was working 40 hours a week again.
Finally, he decided if this was his work, he’d go all in. He opened his own store with the chain Medicine Shoppe Pharmacy in 1999.
“We did that for awhile, but we escaped the franchise and opened a strictly independent,” he said.
And that’s how Gallegos operated for more than 20 years.
He partnered with visiting nurses, hospices and others to deliver the things they needed, and grew his customer base in the process.
The difficult part of retirement, Gallegos said, is missing his customers, to whom he had grown “attached.”
“You know their idiosyncrasies, their names. They become more than just your customers. They become like family. So, it’s tough,” he said. “You don’t get that at a chain. You’re just another person, though I think some of them are trying to change that, but that’s why you get independents.”