Brooks Pharmacy

Brooks Pharmacy

File:Brookpharmacylogo.jpg
Company type	Pharmacy
Founded	1971
Headquarters	Warwick, Rhode Island
Products	Retail/Pharmacy
Website	http://www.brooksrx.com/

Brooks Pharmacy is a chain of more than 330 pharmacies located throughout New England and New York and has been a well-recognized name in the New England pharmacy industry for more than 65 years.

Brooks Pharmacy is currently a unit of the Quebec-based Jean Coutu Group. The corporate headquarters is located in Rhode Island. Brooks is slated to be acquired by Rite Aid in early 2007, and in effect, the Brooks trade name, long associated with New England drug retailing, will be soon be retired.

History

For many years Brooks Pharmacy was a division of the Rhode Island-based Adams Drug Company, along with several other Northeastern drug chains. In 1986, corporate raider Ronald Perelman acquired the Adams Drug chain and opted to convert all of the Adams stores over to the Brooks trade name.

Perelman, however, quickly resold Brooks to the defunct Indiana-based Hook-SupeRx drug chain in 1988. Under the reign of Hook-SupeRx, Brooks assumed a new management team with Gail W. Doster as COO, William Welsh in charge of operations, David Morrocco in charge of purchasing. Doster, Welch, and Morrocco attempted to modernize the store base and turn around what was once a struggling chain.

In 1994, Revco acquired Brooks as part of its larger purchase of the Hook-SupeRx chain. At the time, the Brooks store base stretched from Maine to Maryland, and Revco had no interest in operating the Brooks outlets in New England, as they considered them outside of their core market. As a result, that same year, Revco sold all of the New England Brooks stores to the Canadian-based Jean Coutu Group, which had already been operating stores under the Maxi Drug trade name in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The Brooks stores retained by Revco outside of New England later assumed the Revco banner, while subsequently, Jean Coutu rebranded its Maxi stores as Brooks.

Under the management of Jean Coutu, Brooks was successful for several years, growing and acquiring other smaller chains throughout the New England region. In 1999, Brooks acquired the Burlington, Vermont-based City Drug Chain, greatly increasing its market share in the State of Vermont, and in 2001, Brooks purchased all of the New England Osco Drug stores from Albertson's. Shortly after the Osco acquisition, President Michel Coutu made a commitment to significantly increase the size of the chain by the year 2004. This expansion was accomplished in August of 2004 with the acquisition of apprx. 1,539 Eckerd Pharmacies as well as Eckerd's headquarters in Florida.

By 2005, Coutu had merged the operations of the Brooks and Eckerd chains together at Brooks headquarters in Rhode Island, shuttering the former Eckerd headquarters in Florida. Between 2005 and 2006 Coutu ran into many difficulties integrating the Brooks and Eckerd chains together, and as a result, Coutu's Brooks and Eckerd outlets experienced a significant decline in market share.

On August 23, 2006, the Wall Street Journal annouced that Rite Aid would be buying the Eckerd Pharmacy and Brooks Pharmacy chains from the Quebec-based Jean Coutu Group for US$3.4 billion. Rite Aid announced in the deal that the Brooks name will be retired in favor of the more nationally-known Rite Aid banner.