SOMETIMES SEATTLE EARNS its gloomy reputation. It was cold, dark, and wet on the February morning I arrived, and I needed a new umbrella.
This should have been a temporary inconvenience, at worst. Seattle—home base to Amazon, Microsoft, Costco, Starbucks—is one of our nation’s most important commercial hubs, and one of its wealthiest cities. Surely there would be several drugstores downtown, eager to sell me new rain gear.
But many of the stores I walked past were long closed, or filled with shelves that alternated between empty and locked-up. Finally I came to the darkened entrance of what was, until December, store No. 1 of Bartell Drugs, a beloved local chain now owned by Rite Aid. One of the windows still had the Bartell’s logo and a sign declaring it was “Est. 1890”; taped above them was a “For Lease” poster. Signs on the door told customers their prescriptions had been transferred to the Walgreens up the street. Huddled under a dirty white blanket, a person slept in the entryway.
“It’s heartbreaking,” says Ryan Oftebro, an owner of Kelley-Ross, one of the last remaining general-purpose pharmacies in downtown Seattle. “Bartell’s was community-focused and local, and that’s where you went for high-quality service.”
Bartell’s, as everybody calls it in Seattle, was passed down from father to son to grandchildren over 130 years before the Bartell family sold it to Rite Aid in 2020. By then, the business had 67 locations, annual revenues of $550 million, and the title of the country’s oldest family-run pharmacy. Even today, walking into one of the roughly 40 remaining Bartell’s feels like entering a time portal to the days of soda fountains and the neighborhood pharmacist who knew your kids’ names and the dates of their last colds: friendly clerks, folksy signs, aisles full of toys and chocolates. “Bartell’s has always been more than a drugstore,” one of many columnists lamenting its fate recently wrote. “It is part of the fabric of Seattle.”
And now it’s dying. Rite Aid declared bankruptcy in October, and since then it has said it will close more than 520 stores. The casualties include a third of the Bartell Drugs locations in the region, one of which was the last 24-hour pharmacy operated by any company in downtown Seattle: Today, anyone who wakes up in the middle of the night seeking cold medicine, or help for a child with an ear
