Kennedy Rite Aid pharmacy to close Thursday; rest of store June 22

Lynne Deliman has seen her share of changes during her time in the drugstore business.

That’s what happens when you put in just short of 39 years.

But come the end of June, Deliman will more than likely see her final change, as the Rite Aid store that she’s been managing in Kennedy Township since October 2022 is scheduled to close its doors for good.

Deliman, who was 19 when she began working for Rite Aid’s predecessor – Thrift Drug – when it was located in McKees Rocks in 1986, said she has “no idea” what she’ll do after she locks the doors to her current store for the last time.

“I think I might do a little unemployment,” she said recently. “I’ve been working since I was 13.”

Deliman and scores of other Rite Aid employees will need to find work elsewhere as the chain is closing dozens of stores, including the one she manages at 1700 Pine Hollow Road.

That store’s pharmacy will close Thursday, June 5, according to a Rite Aid spokeswoman, and the front of the store will close June 22. Deliman said a liquidation sale already is in progress.

Prescriptions will be transferred to a nearby Giant Eagle pharmacy, but Deliman said customers can simply contact that store and have their prescriptions moved to a pharmacy of their choice if they’d rather go elsewhere.

“They can go anywhere – CVS, Walgreens, Costco,” she said.

People also can get their prescriptions moved to Primary Care Pharmacy at Heritage Valley Kennedy; several of Deliman’s former employees already have relocated there.

Deliman said rumors had been circulating for weeks about when her store would close, but employees were not allowed to tell anyone. Then a little over a week ago, Deliman spoke up when she saw a local resident had posted something about it on social media.

“What are they going to do – fire you?” she asked rhetorically. “When that (woman) posted, I said, ‘We’re all closing. No more Rite Aid.’”

Deliman said her store has been limping to the finish line. “We can’t even get the grass cut,” she said.

She said she and others began to get suspicious of the store’s future when it first filed for bankruptcy protection in 2023. Eventually, the store emerged from that situation, but its inventory never fully recovered, Deliman said.

Several vendors pulled out and even when shipments arrived from the warehouse, Deliman said they were never as robust as they had been. In early May, she said she had an inkling the end was near, and that was confirmed when the company made her and other employees watch an executive spell it out on a broadcast.

On May 5, the company began Chapter 11 proceedings for a second time to help it pursue a “strategic and value-maximizing sale process for substantially all of its assets,” according to the company’s website.

Matt Schroeder, Rite Aid’s CEO, said he was encouraged by “meaningful interest from a number of potential national and regional strategic acquirors. As we move forward, our key priorities are ensuring uninterrupted pharmacy services for our customers and preserving jobs for as many associates as possible.”

Ten days later, the company announced it had successfully reached deals to begin transitioning pharmacy assets from more than 1,000 store locations across the nation to operators including CVS, Walgreens, Albertsons, Kroger and Giant Eagle.

Prior to the May 5 announcement, Deliman said she and others held out hope that the store might go in a different direction, abandoning freestanding stores like hers for smaller Medicine Shoppe-like operations.

“But I guess we were too far gone,” she said.

Deliman said many of her store’s customers have taken the closure news hard, with some expressing sadness and others anger.

“I’ve had people calling in crying and asking where they’re going to get their medicine,” she said. “I’ve had people go back and thank the pharmacist for taking care of them.

“We thank them for coming in and supporting us and sticking by us during this hard time.”

Deliman said customers were particularly appreciative during the COVID-19 pandemic when the store had vaccines to administer.

“People would call and ask, ‘Can you get my mom in, my grandfather in?’” Deliman recalled. “We’d tell them, ‘Bring your mom down – we have three more shots.’ Everybody loved us then.”

As the store’s inventory declined in recent months, though, some people voiced their displeasure.

“People complained that we never had anything on the shelves,” Deliman said. “But there were reasons for that. Until you work in retail, you will never realize.”

Deliman has spent her entire adult life working in retail, first at Kaufmann’s department store downtown then helping to open a Family Dollar location in McKees Rocks before landing a position at Thrift Drug. Her first day of work there was July 22, 1986. Since then, she has watched that store morph into several others – Eckerd, Eckerd Brooks and eventually Rite Aid.

She rose to the rank of store manager while Eckerd ran the operation and held that position for 15 years there before the McKees Rocks store closed and she – and most of the employees – moved to the Pine Hollow Road location in October 2023.

Now she finds herself taking photos as the current location winds down – something she also did before Thrift Drug became Eckerd and Eckerd gave way to Rite Aid.

“I have three or four photo books from when we closed the old store,” she said. “I took a ton of pictures.

“Never in my life did I think the third-biggest pharmacy would ever go under. We were hoping and praying someone could still go in there. But we’re all closing. There isn’t going to be one Rite Aid left after the next five or six months.”

Photos courtesy of Lynne Deliman