POSITION: Owner
COMPANY: Central Drug Store
WHAT THEY DO: Pharmacy and health center
REVENUE: $7 million
NEXT GOAL: Helping to define an area in Central for a city hall and a community center and to encourage controlled growth
Claud Derbes didn’t have to contend with a Walmart Supercenter a couple of blocks away when he opened Central Drug Store at Hooper and Sullivan roads in 1998, but the independent pharmacist has managed to keep up with nearby big-box competition through some unique services.
Derbes vies with chains such as Walgreens and CVS by offering flu shots, shingles and pneumonia vaccinations, and a quick customer response despite being a compound-prescription pharmacy, meaning his technicians mix medicines by hand.
He says customers drop off orders and then zip down to shop at Walmart, where they chide friends who wait an hour for medication that takes 15 to 20 minutes to get at Derbes’ store, despite the old-fashioned preparation method.
“They see friends and say: ‘Well, you’re a fool. What are you doing that for?’” Derbes says with a laugh. “We’ve been very fortunate. Business has grown very well.”
Hurricane Gustav gave an incentive for Derbes to add health-center services for customers, he says, noting that Central Drug officially is approved for immunizations. For example, he says the hurricane’s disruption forced some elderly clients to drive an hour across town to be monitored for their use of blood-thinning agent Coumadin—an oversight process that involved a prick of the finger and took a couple minutes.
“We got certified and started offering the service,” Derbes says. “Those kind of things, none of the big chains do, and very few of the independents.”
Derbes says he was ahead of the curve in offering daily flu shots to customers starting last fall, something that Walgreens began this season; typically, a pop-up shop might offer the treatment in a rented office on a Saturday. Derbes says he plans to offer H1N1, or swine flu, vaccinations soon as well.
“Our original mission was to serve the patient,” he says. “It wasn’t really a deliberate effort to compete against the Walmarts and CVS’s of the world but to offer services to the people of Central, here, that were not available. We’ll continue to scour the market to find more ways to help people.”
