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By URIAH KISER
NORTH STAFFORD, Va. — The days of the corner drugstore and soda fountain may be long gone, but the independent pharmacy is alive and well in North Stafford.
Sitting along busy Garrisonville Road, surrounded by at least six other corporate chain pharmacies like CVS, Rite Aid, and Walmart, is Dan’s Wellness Pharmacy. It’s not a large store by chain store standards, and the wooden fixtures on the floor and walls harken back to older time when neighbors came to the corner drugstore for advice on what was ailing them, a quick over the counter remedy, or just to say hello. It’s a form of customer service owner Dan Singh and his team of nine staff works hard to provide every day.
“My friends said I was crazy to start a pharmacy here with so much competition around us, but we were all very surprised at how it grew,” said Singh.
Today, Dan’s Wellness Pharmacy fills prescriptions the same way the chain stores do, offers many of the same products on its shelves, but it has cornered the market in herbal remedies and “compounding,” the art of creating specialized medications for individual people and pets. It’s a unique service his competitors don’t offer, and they refer their customers that ask for it to him.
Starting out
The independent pharmacy gene is Singh’s blood. When he started in the industry in 1993, he began working at an independent pharmacy in Connecticut. He learned all he could and worked for eight years at the shop before taking a job as a pharmacy manager for Rite Aid stores in the Fredericksburg, Va. area. He met his wife, who was living in Arlington at the time, and spent his days on the road managing stores from Manassas to Waynesboro.
Then children came along and he wanted to be closer to family, so he came off the road and took a job at CVS in North Stafford. He worked there for three years and got bored, he said. He then began working on a business plan to open his own pharmacy, and when CVS got word of that, he was out.
“I figured it was time to better myself now, or the only other option was to stay working for a chain the rest of my life,” said Singh.
A Stafford resident, he knew that’s where he wanted his pharmacy to be. But he also knew he didn’t have a lot of cash on hand to get it started. He found a used furniture store in North Carolina that had old store fixtures – which can cost up to $50,000 brand new to outfit a store, said Singh. He paid $5,000 and took everything that the store had.
Growth
What he thought would take a year or more to do happened relatively quickly in just eight months – growth. When he opened six years ago, Singh went to area doctors and told them about his new pharmacy, touting its benefits as being the only independent pharmacy in Stafford.
He called it a “wellness pharmacy” when he opened, and he said that proved to be a minor mistake.
“People saw the sign and they tended to think it was more of a health food store than a pharmacy,” he said.
But he’s overcome that perception, and now many of his customers know the pharmacy to be a place they can rely on for good advice.
“Customers come to me because they know they are getting advice from an owner,” said Singh. “As I’ve grown, I’m still here, though I have a full-time staff, I like to sit in my office with the lights on and my windows open so the customers can still see me.”
There are plans to expand the Dan’s Wellness Pharmacy brand, known online as Dan’s Care. Singh said it’s too early to say where he’ll open a new independent pharmacy, but one will open soon in Virginia.
