Roosevelt Island Residents Ask For Full Service Pharmacy At Local Gristedes and Duane Reade - Main Street Master Leaseholder Hudson Related Says Its Up To Residents To Lobby Stores For Improvements
Some Roosevelt Island residents have expressed dissatisfaction with the inadequacies of the Gristedes
and Duane Reade pharmacy sections
and are seeking a full service drug store to serve the Roosevelt Island community. For instance, Duane Reade has this sign currently posted at it's cash register
As reported in this March post, the Roosevelt Island Residents Association (RIRA) Island Services Committee has taken notice of the situation:
Full-Services Pharmacy on RIand two weeks ago, Chair Aaron Hamburger sent this request to Hudson Related Master Leaseholder Principal David Kramer:
This is a new issue which ISC will pursue. In summary, RI no longer has a full-services pharmacy. Duane Reade will not accept prescriptions managed by Express Script drug plans. Soon this may be extended to Medco plans as Express Scripts is trying to acquire Medco. In addition, DR will no longer deliver. Gristedes will accept prescriptions from all plans and will deliver (but only to pre-registered customers). However, Gristedes maintains a limited variety of drugs in the store. So, many customers have to wait one or two days for the particular drug(s) to be delivered to the store.
We will initially attack this problem by dealing with Hudson-Related, the controllers of the leases for both Duane Reade and Gristedes.
As mentioned in our brief conversation on Friday, we need your help in trying to restore a full-services pharmacy on RI.Yesterday I asked Mr. Kramer:
We do not want a new pharmacy. We just need to improve/change the two exiting pharmacies.
Here's the situation:
Duane Reade no longer accepts prescriptions from Express Script (which affects 15-20% of their presciption business on RI and many customers) and DR has stopped delivering to customers. Gristedes carries a very limited inventory of drugs on-site, has limited Sunday hours and a limited delivery service.
What's needed at Gristedes is an expansion of their pharmacy space (when they renovate the entire store) so they can carry more drugs on-site, and a more liberal delivery service. At DR, they need to change their policy and again accept Express Script presciptions plus resume the delivery service that existed when they began operations on RI, but terminated deliveries (without notice) about 9 months ago.
Since you control the leases for both Gristedes and DR, we hope that you can put enough pressure on one or both of these stores to permit a return to a full-services pharmacy.
Thanks for doing whatever you believe is possible to relieve our pharmacy problems.
... is anything Hudson Related can do to improve the Roosevelt Island pharmacy offerings?Mr. Kramer replied:
We don/can’t tell tenants how to run the specifics of their business. It’s up to residents to lobby these businesses.During the March 12 Gristedes Town Hall meeting, Roosevelt Island resident Raye Schwartz explained to Gristedes owner John Catsimatidis and David Kramer why she thought a full service pharmacy was needed for Roosevelt Island. Mr. Catsimatidis replied that he would look into the situation and that he recently hired a former Duane Reade employee to "beef up" the Gristedes Pharmacy, Health and Beauty sections.
UPDATE 6/27 - Mr. Hamburger sent the following reply to Mr. Kramer:
3 weeks ago, I sent you an e-mail on the full-services pharmacy issue on RI. Today, I learned about your response by reading the RooseveltIslander. Don't understand why you didn't respond directly to me.
Anyway, your response is both disappointing and a cop-out. We never asked or expected you to interfere in the business operations of your tenants. We simply wanted you to bring the issue of a full-services pharmacy to the attention of the management of Gristedes and to Duane Reade. In the case of Gristedes, you could have suggested that since they were about to under go a complete renovation of their store, they might provide more space for the pharmacy section so more drugs could be in the on-site inventory. For Duane Reade, you could have probed into why they will not accept Express Script prescriptions and ask if this policy will be extended to other prescription plans such as Medco. These small actions on your part would be very helpfull in alerting management that they have a real and growing problem in their RI stores. Perhaps, management might then be motivated to take some steps to relive the problem.
8 comments :
Does anybody disagree that HR cannot dictate their tenants how to run a business? They may have a say about how the front facade looks like but they pretty much have no say about what's going on inside. Common sense?
As I understand the situation, Duane Reade isn't serving some prescription plans because it can't reach an agreement on pricing with those plans, not that DR is incapable of providing the medication that is needed. I see lots of pressure being put on the pharmacies and (even further removed) governments and the landlords for the pharmacies, but are you also complaining to your insurer? It seems like they are the best position to give you better access to medications.
I use Aetna. They had a similar spat with Continuum / Beth Israel. We complained to Aetna; they eventually reached an agreement.
HR cannot make DR accept the Medco Rxs - since that is a corporate DR policy. And HR could not get DR or Gristede's Pharm to start making deliveries or expand their delivery hours.
However, HR could at least write to Catsimatides about the Gristides Pharm and let him know that an expanded pharm should be included in the planned store renovation so that medication can be kept on the premises and customers do not have to wait a day or 2 for their prescriptions to be filled.
15-20% came from where?
We. Need a dash. Store. By THE. Kardashians.we must Make THE new hipsters living on THE Island Happy. After all.They are paying High rent to LIVE Here.
As long as both of them take medicaid I am Happy
Mr. Hamburger says the 15 - 20% number came from RI Duane Reade pharmacist who also expressed great concern that if prescriptions are no longer accepted from Medco, it would impact a much greater proportion of prescriptions.
I understand that Walgreens/Duane Reade and Express Scripts have reached an agreement; they will start serving Express Scripts customers on 15 September.
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20120725-715442.html
http://www.stlamerican.com/your_health_matters/health_briefs/article_83d91ec2-dc66-11e1-8504-0019bb2963f4.html
It appears the solution was as expected - customers pressuring their insurance companies (particularly WellPoint) to allow them to use Duane Reade.
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