How Do Retail Pharmacies Make Money

Eyyy. Independent pharmacy here!

Our reimbursement rates are s h i t. We live off rebates and sourcing from multiple wholesalers. Granted, sometimes we do make ok money from some prescriptions but most time it's dollars or pennies.

We buy bulk. All maintenance meds are bought in quantities of 1000's from various suppliers, not just ABC. If we can find a 1000 bottle of gen Hyzaar for 24.99 instead of 39.99 from ABC, we're in. Literally any popular maintenance meds are bought in surplus with the hopes to finish them by the exp date. Losartan, metformin, vasotec, amlodipine etc. We also do vaccines which are pretty nice. If the insurance companies don't cover the shot, we just charge them cash for it and they're fine. It's kind of a blessing that we live in a semi affluent area where people are very small business advocative. We make like 10$~ for the trivalent and ~15$ for the quad. I'm not sure about the rest of the line like mmr, pneumovax etc.

A lot of people seem to forget we're a business too and need to make money. I'm sorry that your insurance is charging you $403.44 for brand Locoid and you're taking it to rite-aid because they're cheaper. Their owners don't cry at night because they're losing money on prescriptions. It's not all fun and games as you'd think.

OTC products are also very key. Sometimes when we're backed up and people are waiting, they'd grab a couple things off the shelf. That adds about 2-3$ to our overall profit from the rx. The people that purchase a lot of their household products from us are saviors.

It's such a stingy business which I'd have never imagined had I not gotten into the field and progressed. But that's pretty much the gist of it. We live off of 10 wholesalers and trxade/matchrx for getting rid of things we don't use anymore. I can't count the # of times the owner cursed and wished hell on earth for the insurance companies' corporate staff.

Fun story: We opened up a bottle of DR Doxycycline (like 1000$) for a PT's daughter and she didn't want it anymore. The owner was about to have an aneurism. Wasn't his best day. The bottle is still sitting on the shelf as a reminder to not open things until the PT is in it 110%.