A sign on the door served as the only notice that Wayne is now a one-pharmacy town. Shopko's pharmacy officially closed as of Sunday, Jan. 13. All prescription records were moved to U-Save Pharmacy in Wayne.
Shopko's corporate branch announced in December that both Kroger and Hy-Vee acquired over 60 Shopko pharmacies, combined. Shopko also announced last month that the company planned to liquidate 39 stores across 19 states, including Nebraska.
Wayne's Shopko posted a notice on the front door of the business explaining to customers that U-Save Pharmacy now had prescription information.
"When a pharmacy closes, that pharmacy doesn't have the option to send some prescriptions here and some another place and some another place," said U-Save Pharmacy owner and pharmacist Mark Patefield. "The options are basically that it can go to one place or they (all of the pharmacy's prescriptions) can just disappear and not be available. Obviously, this is going to be the most convenient place for their prescriptions to be."
Patefield said U-Save only found out for certain that the transfer was happening, at the last minute.
"I did not know for sure until 3 o'clock on Friday (Jan. 11)," Patefield said. "We (members of Shopko's corporate team and Patefield) had talked the previous week about possibly doing it the previous Friday (Jan. 4), but then as of last Wednesday we weren't going to do anything but then Thursday started talking again."
The short notice was slightly overwhelming for U-Save. The turn-around didn't give Patefield time to build up inventory or hire extra staff, but he said he and his team were willing to rise to the challenge.
Patefield is asking new patients and old to bear with his staff while his software absorbs the patient information.
"Most of the time you have time to get the information and download it into your pharmacy system so things run smoothly and you have it at your finger tips to fill prescriptions for people, but with the short notice, that wasn't able to happen," Patefield said.
On Monday, U-Save staff had to manually search through a spreadsheet for new customer information. Patefield said he is currently working with his software company to expedite the transfer process, with the goal of cutting wait-times down to the pre-Shopko Pharmacy closure of five to 10 minutes.
For those former Shopko customers who would be having automatic refills coming up soon, Patefield said the best thing to do is call the pharmacy at (402) 375-2922, a few days before the prescription is out. Because of patient confidentiality, U-Save doesn't have all of the information that Shopko stored so customers should also bring in medication bottles and insurance cards if they're filling for the first time with U-Save.
We reached out to Shopko's corporate headquarters and the company was unable to be reached by press time. As more information is available, The Wayne Herald will update this story.
