With retirement of third-generation pharmacist Barry Barth, Main Street drug store to change hands in January

Barth’s Drug Store, a fixture on Main Street in Riverhead for nearly a century, will be under new ownership in 2016.

Barry Barth, who has operated the pharmacy for 44 years, is retiring, and for the first time since its establishment by his grandfather, Fred E. Barth, in 1917, Barth’s Drug Store will be owned and operated by someone outside the Barth family.

The business is being sold to Bhaskar (Bobby) Gunjupali of Manorville, who will continue to operate the pharmacy as Barth’s Drug Store.

“He’s a really nice guy who has the youth, energy, experience and motivation to reinvent and re-merchandise the front of the pharmacy,” Barth said in an interview yesterday.

“We need to be updated with new merchandise and new merchandising to fit the new economy,” he said. Barth, who turns 69 in February and is ready to kick back — “I want to do some fishing,” he said — recognizes he’s not the right person for the task.

“I’ve been toying with this idea for some time,” Barth said. “Finding the right person, someone I felt comfortable with, took a while.”

Gunjupali, whose wife is a physician, is the father of two children. He has “quite a bit of retail experience,” Barth said. He currently works in the pharmacy at John T. Mather Memorial Hospital in Port Jefferson.

“It takes a full-time, agressive pharmacist to make this all work because of the insurance companies,” Barth said. Insurance reimbursements “are minimal at best,” he said.

“People wouldn’t believe how little we get paid. We’ll have to buy it for $900 and for that investment we’ll earn maybe $6,” Barth said.

Price increases by manufacturers can be dramatic from one month to the next — and the reimbursements don’t change, he said. “An item that cost $75 in November, we go back to buy it in December and it’s $840. There’s no incentive for the insurance compay to raise the price. So you have to either take the hit or tell the customer you’re sorry but you can’t fill it.” He often has to sell a drug for less than he paid for it. “The averages make it possible for us to stay in business.”

On top of that, some insurance plans impose mandatory mail-order for all prescriptions more than a 21-day supply. That’s true of all county employees now, he said.

All of these things combine to make it very difficult for an independent pharmacy to stay afloat following a traditional business model.

The pharmacy needs someone at the helm with the retailing chops to reinvent the front of the store to serve what Main Street is evolving into, Barth said.

“It’s becoming a place where people come to eat and maybe for some entertainment. It’s destinations. It’s not a place where people come to walk down the street and shop, like it used to be,” he said.

The Barth family once did business on a Main Street lined with retail stores. People would walk from shop to shop downtown to fill their needs — and their prescriptions. Those days are long over.

Barth, who was a founding member and the first president of the Riverhead Business Improvement District in 1991, formed to pursue the ever-elusive goal of downtown revitalization, watched Main Street steadily lose ground to the retail centers built on Route 58. “It wasn’t any one thing,” he said, reflecting on the demise of the Main Street shopping district. “It was all of it, compounded.”

The closing of Swezey’s Department Stores was the definitive moment in the death of Main Street as a shopping district, Barth said.

The one bright spot for his business has been the Hyatt Place hotel, he said. People staying at the hotel for two or three days will take a stroll downtown and come into Barth’s looking to shop.

But he sees the potential for change as people move into new apartments being build on Main Street.

“Someone like Bobby will be able to position the pharmacy to change with it,” he said.

Barth opened a second location, Barth’s Pharmacy, in Westhampton Beach in 1976, after a fire in Riverhead shuttered his business here. It was taking so long to get a building permit in Riverhead that he opened up a store in a new location so he could earn a living, he said. When he wanted to rebuild after the fire, which started in a uniform shop next door and spread to the drug store, he was prevented by a code that required any store longer than 50 feet to have two exits. Thanks to the intervention of then-supervisor Allen Smith, who interceded with neighboring property owners, Barth was eventually able to buy a second lot adjoining his original lot on the north.

He sold the Westhampton Beach store in 2004. The new owner subsequently opened two additional stores operating under the Barth’s Pharmacy name, in East Moriches and East Quogue.

So the Barth’s name lives on in pharmacies on the East End even if the Barth family is not involved. Barth’s father Donald took over the business from his dad just after World War II. Barry Barth took over in 1971.

It’s a little disappointing that the business won’t be passed on to the fourth generation of Barth pharmacists, he allows. “But my two daughters are very happy doing what they’re doing.” His fatherly pride is evident as he talks about their accomplishments. Rachel is in upstate Granville, where she works as a pharmacy technician in Glens Falls Hospital and runs a theater and dance company, which is “where her heart and soul are.” Lauren, an equestrian, lives in Tampa and is about to open a 35-stall, state-of-the-art riding facility. “They’re both doing what they are passionate about, and that’s what matters,” Barth said.

At 44 years in the family business, Barth notes, “I guess I was the Barth that was here the longest.”

Over the years, he’s grown close to the people he served — generations of families. Like his grandfather and father before him, he’d go downtown to open up for someone who needed medication or some other item after hours.

Yesterday, he was serving lifelong customer Marilyn Ross of Riverhead, who recalled her mother saying that Barry Barth’s grandfather opened the store up because she’d lost her pacifier as an infant and her mother was desperate for a replacement.

“She went to his house and he came downtown and opened it up so she could get me a pacifier,” Ross said, smiling. “I’m very sad that he’s leaving. I’m going to miss him.”

“A lot of my customers are my friends and a lot of my friends are my customers,” Barth said.

“It’s been a nice run.”