Boyd's Pharmacy in Florence has a prescription for business success

FLORENCE For three generations, Boyds Pharmacy has been dispensing pills and reassurance to area residents and their families.

Its roots go deep. Our customers are very loyal. Some are from families that were customers in 1922, said L. Clark Boyd III, a pharmacist and scion of the family business. That was the year his grandfather opened the first Boyds on Front Street, not far from its present location, where they moved in 1953.

In 2008, a total renovation and facelift brought it up to date and, today, it is the main store and the business headquarters of the five-pharmacy enterprise.

Over time, the landscape of the pharmaceutical world has been rocked by change, especially for small, family-owned operations like Boyds. Even more than the competition from large, national chains, the exploding mail order business is a source of frustration.

When it comes to CVS and Walgreens, I call it friendly competition, Boyd said. The mail order business is another story. They are stealing patients, he said. We have lost half our patients to mail order. I am penalized.

To meet the challenges, the pharmacist is innovating, streamlining and offering new services once unheard of in a neighborhood drugstore. A clinic, located off the pharmacys main sales floor, provides immunizations, blood pressure checks and diabetes monitoring, among other services.

Currently, the shots offered for shingles are very popular, Boyd said.

Communication lines between the pharmacist and insurance companies need to be more open, Boyd believes. We all want to keep patients out of the hospital, he said.

Pharmaceutical training is more extensive today even than it was when Boyd was in school.

According to Joseph Montalto, one of three pharmacists on the staff, the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy has replaced its four-year program with a six-year course of study that culminates in a doctor of pharmacy degree.

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Boyd's Pharmacy in Florence has a prescription for business success