2013’s Top 50 Retail Pharmacies, according to Drug Store News

Drug Store News (DSN) just released it latest rundown of the top pharmacy retailers in the powerfully-titled POWERx Top 50 list. Click here for for this free download.

I highly recommend the POWERx list to anyone who competes with, sell to, or interacts with retail pharmacies. This useful resource provides brief profiles of all 50 organizations. These range from CVS (#1, with $45.6 billion in prescription sales) to Ritzman Pharmacy (#50, with $58 million in prescription sales). Consistent with last year’s list, the largest chain drugstore dispenses nearly 800 times as much as the 50th largest drugstore.

Below, I show DSN's top 20 largest pharmacies and contrast the list with our 2013 list of top retail, mail, and specialty pharmacies.

As a bonus, we also have an exclusive, must-see video of Rob Eder and the Drug Store News dancers.

Here are the largest 20 retail pharmacies, as measured by Drug Store News. See the original article for the footnotes.

[Click to Enlarge]

In the Drug Channels Institute’s (DCI) 2013–14 Economic Report on Retail, Mail, and Specialty Pharmacies, Exhibit 9 lists the "Largest U.S. Pharmacies Ranked by Total Prescription Revenues, 2013." The list is available for free download in 2013’s Top Pharmacies by Rx Revenues: The Big Get Bigger.

Key differences between the lists:

• The DCI list includes mail pharmacies. Express Scripts is the third-largest dispensing pharmacy, by revenues. Express Scripts doesn’t appear on the DSN list, because it operates as a mail/specialty pharmacy without retail locations...yet.

• The DCI figures are based on calendar year data, which do not always correspond to the fiscal year data provided in the DSN list.

• The DSN list includes such wholesaler marketing/franchise groups as Good Neighbor Pharmacy, Health Mart, and Medicine Shoppe. The DCI report includes these organizations in Exhibit 63 (Pharmacy Buying Groups and Primary/Preferred Wholesaler Relationship). DCI’s data differs from the DSN list. (I’m skeptical about the $15.2 billion that DSN attributes to Cardinal Health.)

• The DCI list excludes non-outpatient drug revenue from Walgreens.

• The DCI combines Walmart and Sam’s Club, while DSN lists them separately.

Here’s a video of Rob Eder, editor in chief of The Drug Store News Group, confabulating about the latest POWERx list. Click here if you can’t see the video.

I now understand Rob’s recent editorial: Having fun ... and kicking ass doing it. (Yes, that's his actual article title.)