Drugstore Calls It Quits After 49 Years

On this of all days, Ed Waller didn’t need to wear his usual white uniform embroidered with the words “Ed, Pharmacist.” Customers at Moorpark Pharmacy have been greeting him by name for well over three decades.

But as the neighborhood landmark co-owned by Waller and Woodland Hills resident Alvin Arst prepared to close its doors for good Monday after 49 years, the uniform’s straightforward message seemed an appropriate tribute to an establishment--and perhaps an era--gone by.

“Ours is a service business,” said Waller, 74, between bites of a farewell sandwich in the store’s back room. “And service today doesn’t mean anything anymore.”

The owners blame the proliferation of health maintenance organizations and the cost-cutting stealth of large chain drugstores for the demise of Moorpark Pharmacy, which has specialized in serving entertainers from its neon-lit location just off the Hollywood Freeway since the end of World War II.

Nationally, according to industry statistics, more than 2,000 independent pharmacies went out of business in 1996; in California they close at a rate of one per business day. In June, a federal judge approved a $351-million settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by pharmacies arguing that a dual-pricing policy by major drug makers made them less competitive than HMOs.

“This is the part of America that is not good,” Arst mused while regulars swapped reminiscences and promised to keep in touch.

“I always had the sense of this being that old-time, neighborhood kind of store, part of a whole block,” said 20-year customer Alan Kaplan of Studio City.

Files on Moorpark Pharmacy’s several thousand regular customers will be transferred to a Thrifty Drug Store in Studio City. Waller and a handful of Moorpark’s 15 employees are going to work there.

Others, like four-year store manager Colleen Stinchfield, don’t have plans. “I’m going to just lie on the beach for a while,” she said. “This place really was a family for me.”

After a slight pause, she added: “And now it’s just another family breaking up.”