Mark Lennihan/Associated Press Duane Reade has been gobbled up by Walgreen.
In the 50 years since it named itself for the side streets closest to its first store, Duane Reade has had a singular relationship with New York. Complicated, unavoidable, convenient, annoying — whatever that relationship was, even Duane Reade seemed to understand how deeply it had worked its way into the municipal psyche.
On Wednesday, Duane Reade added another new and complicated layer to its relationship. The chain with the citycentric slogan— “Your city. Your drugstore” —sold itself to another chain that also started with a single store.
A chain from somewhere else. A chain even larger Duane Reade.
Walgreen said it was paying $1.075 billion for Duane Reade, which, at last count, had 150 stores in Manhattan. Only the Starbucks and Subway restaurant chains had more stores in Manhattan. Citywide, Duane Reade had 229 stores, about 3½ times as many as Walgreen has.
But Walgreen has 7,162 stores nationwide.
The deal left eyeliner-and-toothpaste buyers wondering what it would mean in places where Duane Reade and Walgreen’s drugstores stare at each other across the street. On East 86th Street near Lexington Avenue, a Duane Reade is on the odd-numbered side of the street, opposite a Walgreen’s store. In Times Square, Duane Reade occupies the storefront at 1470 Broadway. Walgreen is across the street, at 1471.
But the transaction also left customers thinking about their emotional connection to places as mundane as drugstores. For some, the connection is not all that pleasant: The Web site ihateduanereade.blogspot.com carried a photograph of a flaming bus, doctored to show a Duane Reade trademark on the side.
Or consider what someone who signed himself nb said in a comment to The Times’s DealBook blog: “Duane Reade is the DMV of drug stores, they will not be missed.”
Some customers said Duane Reade took the real estate maxim of location, location, location to new levels, squeezing in stores left and right. If there is not one across from the office building where you work, there is one steps from your apartment. If there is not one around the corner from your apartment, there is one next to the restaurant where you are supposed to have dinner or the movie theater showing the movie you want to see afterward.
“I appreciate convenience, I appreciate availability, knowing if I run out of milk I can be there and back in less than 10 minutes,” said Victoria Voketaitis, a booking representative with a company that arranges tours for Broadway and Off-Broadway shows. “But when I start to see what used to be a neighborhood look like a shopping mall, chain after chain after chain, it’s hard not to feel it’s losing the particular neighborhood-y warm feel.”
Some customers say all Duane Reade stores are alike. Norma Peña, a mail clerk who lives in the Bronx, disagrees.
She said she shopped at the Duane Reade at Broadway and West 40th Street because there was more merchandise to choose from there. “I come all the way down here,” she said while buying cough medicine for her sick 15-year-old daughter. “We have one in the Bronx, but they don’t have that much.”
To some customers, the rise of drugstore chains meant the demise of small, owner-operated pharmacies that were probably pricier, but offered service the chain stores do not aspire to. Other customers said chains like Duane Reade have come to serve a different function.
“Duane Reade has replaced the five-and-dimes that sold everything from clothing to pantyhose and cosmetics,” said Irene Wlodarski, the national coordinator for concert and artists department at Steinway & Sons, the piano maker. “You could find a five-and-dime on every block. Now look at Duane Reade. They’re selling stationery, DVDs, books.”
In the last few months Duane Reade has been giving itself a makeover. Under Robert Bass’s private equity firm, Oak Hill Capital Partners, which bought Duane Reade in 2004, Duane Reade has spent the last few months redesigning and remodeling stores. The changes include widening the aisles, seeing that the shelves are not stacked to the ceiling and installing under-the-shelf lighting that does for makeup what makeup is supposed to do for the customer’s face.
By coincidence, a new Duane Reade opened at Eighth Avenue and West 18th Street on Wednesday, just after the Walgreen deal was announced. It impressed Angela Amato, who works at a law firm nearby.
“It’s really fresh,” she said, adding that it looked more like a supermarket than a drugstore. “Some of these stores are old and dinky.”
Alison Bowen contributed reporting.
