Published November 2000

Bartell Drugs keeps
small-business values

By Kimberly Hilden
Herald Business Journal Assistant Editor

George D. Bartell likes to think of himself as a small-business owner, even if it’s not, as he says, “strictly true.”

Sure, as CEO and President of The Bartell Drug Co., he employs more than 1,300 in 49 stores, including a new one in north Everett. And, he said, his company ranks among the top 20 drugstore chains across the country in terms of size.

Still, he’s a small-business owner at heart. “I have very close ties to the community, and I believe in the customer service aspects,” he recently told a group of business people at the Everett Area Chamber of Commerce-sponsored SnoBiz trade show at the Everett Mall. “It’s what we really try to do. It’s something we can do better than our competitors — at least we think we can.”

In recent years, industry consolidation has created drugstore megachains, Bartell said, in which the top two chains have well over $20 billion in sales and more than 100 times the business of the 20th-biggest chain in the nation.

“Frankly, I don’t really like the consolidation that has happened in the country. I don’t like it in our industry, and I don’t like it in other industries ... because I do believe in the virtues of family business and small business and customer service, which always seems to get the short shrift when you’re talking about big, nationwide companies,” said Bartell, whose grandfather George H. Bartell started the family-owned-and-operated Bartell Drug Co. more than 110 years ago.

In those days, Bartell Drugs really was a small business, the current CEO said: a one-store operation near Lake Washington.

Over time, the company built drugstores in downtown Seattle, relying on window displays to sell their wares to waves of foot traffic. To remain successful, though, Bartell Drugs had to change with the times. When Americans began moving to the suburbs after World War II, so, too, did Bartell Drugs.

“We had a difficult transition to make,” Bartell said. “We gradually closed stores (downtown) or replaced them with stores in the suburbs. It took us a while to figure out how to operate them, because we weren’t that experienced at it.

“And my father (then-company President George H. Bartell Jr.) went through some changes in operational management of the company, until finally, probably as a last-ditch effort, he promoted two young store managers to run the company in the early 1960s.

“They determined that we wouldn’t have fewer than 12 stores, and they were also determined to bring Bartell’s into the modern era,” Bartell said.

But the modern era has brought with it challenges of its own in the form of rising prescription drug costs and a shortage of pharmacists to fill a growing number of prescriptions, he said.

“It’s a very tough business right now,” Bartell said.

The adversity hasn’t stopped the company — with stores in Snohomish, King and Pierce counties — from growing, even as Bartell maintains his small-business philosophy.

“People ask me, ‘Are you going to expand to Eastern Washington or Canada or Oregon or California?’ ” Bartell said, adding that there are no such plans because “there’s still plenty to do around here” in the Puget Sound region.

“We look forward to continuing to serve this area for the foreseeable future as a family-owned, family-run company,” he said.

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