Eckerd #3920 / CVS #5230
399 Emerson Dr NW, Palm Bay, FL
This store opened as Eckerd in September 2002. A fairly short lived store for Eckerd, this location was converted to a CVS when they bought out Eckerd's Florida stores in 2004.
Here we can see the front of this former Eckerd building. This store was built with a unique exterior look that appears more "old Florida style" to me, so it's quite different from the typical freestanding Eckerd stores of the time (which looked more like this).
Here is the right side of the store, which faces Minton Road.
Another view of the front of the store.
Those "Welcome!" stickers on the door are a remnant from Eckerd. It's always nice to see CVS leave behind some traces of their predecessor!
Knocking out yet another really short post, until the next time,
AFB
This Eckerd format was the last one designed. They had plans to use this format to expand out west into AZ, CO, and NM. This store format was the first to have aisles that went front to back, not side to side. That was to push more customers past the merchandise, as did Walgreens, to spur sales. All stores started to be converted to this format in 2000 under the direction of JWH. Eckerd absolutely sucked at capturing impulse buys, as their high-lo pricing scheme was extremely high, and the items subsidized from the jobbers/merchants were the only things lo, along with whatever items they had in the circulars to draw in the customers (typically sodas and paper goods), who only tended to buy those items and then left. Hence the inconsistent cash flow and poor sales.
ReplyDeleteThe stories I could tell about Eckerd would be mind boggling. Managers used inventory books almost until the end, as there was no central inventory system. Total company sales took 3 business days to reconcile. Each store kept their own electronic Rx file, so a customer could not walk into a store and get a refill that had been done in another store, without the staff having to research the exact store number, look it up in the system, do a manual transfer process, and then if the customer went back to the original store the staff would have to repeat the process. This was terribly problematic with customers from the NE coming to FL to vacation; both Walgreens and CVS had better connected systems making it a more simple process.
Seasonal goods often got shoved into boxes and stored for the next year.
Everyone at Corp who had a brain knew they had a problem yet the organization was siloed so there was no incentive to work together to solve the issues, only encouragement to build little fiefdoms inside the org that created work for themselves. Many of the folks had been there for so long they were "institutionalized" and just figured it had worked this long and would keep on working, never seeing the coming storm. It looked like a government process, although at Eckerd the money ran out when JC Penney pulled the plug.
Florida and Texas, each their own operating divisions in the company (NE, SE, OH&PA, CO&AZ being the others) floated the terribly performing Thrift and NE, SE, OH&PA stores. Little wonder why CVS bought these territories and they're still in business, while the other three divisions were sold to Brooks, who went bankrupt trying to swallow Eckerd and subsequently sold off to Rite Aid, which sold a large chunk to Walgreens. Plenty of Eckerd's are repurposed in the SE to auto parts stores, goodwills, dollar generals, and even some Walgreens which is hilarious as WAG always said they grew organically to control their store experience.
Source - Corp employee for a few years, got to witness the collapse up front and personal, it was entirely predictable.