Resurrecting Rite Aid
zombies
Rite Aid has closed 70+ stores in the Philly area since 2022, and even
more before that. What's become of them?

The curved stucco facade with faded lettering.

The vacant drive-thru lane.

The sliding glass doors, now secured shut, guarding empty shelves once full of nail polish and makeup, Halloween candy and holiday wreaths, and medicines for almost any common ailment.

You may have one of these Rite Aid zombies — an increasingly relevant term for vacant real estate — in your neighborhood, and wonder what it might become. Perhaps a Starbucks, a Dollar General, or an Aldi? Maybe even a drive-thru car wash or an urgent care?

Since 2022, the chain has closed at least 73 locations in the Philadelphia region, including the city and its suburbs of Bucks, Burlington, Camden, Chester, Delaware, Gloucester, and Montgomery Counties. Center City no longer has any Rite Aid stores.

“The decision to close a store is not one we take lightly,” the company said in a statement shared by spokesperson Alicja Wojczyk. “Rite Aid regularly assesses its retail footprint to ensure we are operating efficiently while meeting the needs of our customers, communities, associates and overall business.”

Within the last three years, as the Philadelphia-based chain entered and then emerged from bankruptcy, Rite Aid has chopped its regional footprint by more than 40%, with about 100 Philly-area stores still open as of early December. And some of those, while open for business, often lack a full complement of products in any given section, worrying some consumers and driving others to shop elsewhere.

While Rite Aid “had to make difficult business decisions over the past several months to improve our business and optimize our retail footprint,” the company statement said, “we are committed to becoming financially and operationally healthy.”

Rite Aid had been closing area stores before the bankruptcy filing in October 2023. By December 2023, the company had closed 200 more stores nationwide.

Rite Aid has nearly halved its U.S. store count in two years, going from some 2,400 stores in 2022 to about 1,260 in 2024.

Area “Zombie” Rite Aid Stores

Since 2022, Rite Aid has chopped its regional footprint by about 40%, by The Inquirer’s math, with some 100 stores still open as of early December. Nationally, the company has roughly cut its store count by half in the last two years.

Locally, many of these 8,000- to 16,000-square-foot store shells sit empty, their insides gathering dust and their futures debated on neighborhood Facebook groups. They’re everywhere — from congested suburban intersections to small-town main streets to crowded city blocks.

The good news for these Rite Aid zombies, said Steven H. Gartner of real estate services firm CBRE, is that they’re often “in very good shape” and in locations with “adequate parking and visibility.”

“The challenges are that not everybody wants that size,” Gartner said. “In true ‘Three Bears’ fashion, it’s sometimes either too big or too small.”

Smaller grocers like Lidl, Aldi, and Grocery Outlet have had success moving into former Rite Aids, as have discount stores like Dollar General. So have laundromats, medical offices, even drive-thru car washes.

To former customers of closed Rite Aids, the vacancies represent more than just a neighborhood eyesore. They’re the skeletons of a once-essential stop — where they’d pick up crucial prescriptions or grab cough medicine to soothe a child in the middle of the night, or secure the all-important last-minute Valentine’s Day gift. And the closures meant frustrations and adjustments for pharmacy customers who had to start getting prescriptions from a new drug store.

Neighbors of these empty storefronts may feel left behind even as they anticipate what the space might become. As they debate the possibilities and share rumors about potential tenants, they hope for a useful business that adds value to the community and convenience to their lives.

In the Philadelphia region, here’s what has become of a few.

Spirit Halloween, for a moment

On the corner of 10th and Market Streets, pictures of Halloween getups adorned the windows of a former Rite Aid in October, touting the brand that’s become an unsurprising presence at shuttered storefronts: Spirit Halloween.

The pop-up markets are known to peddle creepy and colorful costumes and accessories, but the Market Street location had shut its doors by early November, and the former pharmacy was once again sitting empty a month later.

Early in December, the overhead lights were on but the interior of the store had been cleared — no shelves, registers, or other visible fixtures indicated that it once served as a pharmacy, which closed in May 2022.

One window appeared broken and boarded up, with small shards of glass still laying on the floor beneath the window sill, trapped inside the store. A relic of the pharmacy’s past remained: blue plastic commercial bins stacked in a corner window, one labeled “property of Rite Aid Corp.”

A plasma company experiments

At a storefront in Cinnaminson, what was once a Rite Aid is now a plasma donation site.

Kedplasma, which has locations across the country, took over the 12,000-square-foot former pharmacy on U.S. Route 130, drawn to its “visibility and ease of access,” according to a company spokesperson.

On a rainy afternoon in mid-December, the center was quiet, with a couple people coming and going. Its large parking lot sat mostly empty, as trucks and cars whizzed by.

It took about a year of construction to convert the store to a donation site. Kedplasma had never before moved into an existing building, having previously opted to build its own storefronts. Taking over the Cinnaminson Rite Aid was an experiment in reducing the typical construction timeline.

Temple takes over

In North Philly, off SEPTA’s Allegheny Station stop, a former Rite Aid sits closed as it awaits its transformation into a medical center. Behind the sliding entry doors, a gray rolling gate blocks the view of what’s inside. But reminders of the pharmacy’s past lingered: a note on the door indicating that prescriptions could be picked up at an alternate Rite Aid, and a large sign in the parking lot urging customers to “walk in today” to stay up to date on COVID-19 vaccines.

The pharmacy at 3260 N. Broad St. was one of the numerous buildings and leases Rite Aid listed for sale in January.

Temple University acquired the store and the entire shopping center around it for $8.2 million. The university seized on the location because of its proximity to Temple’s Health Sciences Center, a spokesperson said.

Temple plans to offer primary care physician services at the former pharmacy. While in early stages, “construction and cosmetic changes to the building are expected to be minimal because the rest of the tenants of the shopping plaza will remain the same,” according to the spokesperson.

‘Exceptional’ buzz at a vacant site

Taped to the door of the shuttered Haddon Township Rite Aid, handwritten signs state the obvious: The store is “CLOSED.” A large parking lot sits empty as cars speed by on busy Cuthbert Boulevard. The corner lot is sandwiched between the bustling downtowns of swanky Haddonfield, a mile away, and vibrant Westmont, two miles in the other direction.

It’s been empty for seven months.

“We’ve had an exceptional amount of interest,” said John Krause, a CBRE broker working for the landlord. “Having the drive-thru is definitely an added cherry on top.”

The space will likely end up split between two tenants. As of mid-November, Krause said, the two deals were being finalized.

The state of the surviving Rite Aids

From Delaware to Bucks Counties, and South Jersey to Philly, customers have taken to social media to complain about the meager selection at their local Rite Aid. Some wonder whether their store will be the next to close.

It’s not just a local problem: There have been reports of empty shelves at pharmacies in Brooklyn and Los Angeles.

Rite Aid declined to answer The Inquirer’s questions about low stock at its roughly 100 remaining stores in the region and the possibility of more closures.

At a Rite Aid in the Italian Market, several shelves were bare on a cold Thursday in December. The hair accessories aisle offered just a few hair ties, claw clips and brushes, alongside backlit Maybelline- and Covergirl-branded signage where mascara, brow and eyeliner products should have been. Two shelves marked to hold toothpaste behind plastic separators sat empty, and a Duracell display as tall as a person only held five packets of batteries toward the bottom.

On the Main Line in Wynnewood, entire sections of basic household items were decimated, with only price tags along the shelves’ edges to show what they were intended to hold. Options were sparse for paper towels, deodorant, dishwashing detergent, razor blades, ibuprofen, and body wash. In the seasonal aisle, three Christmas wreaths hung amid empty hooks.

Customers have noticed the trend.

Kimberly Lewis, of Germantown, said she can’t count on her local Rite Aid to carry even basic items like mouthwash and toothpaste. And of the products they do have in stock, many are behind lock and key in plexiglass security cases, said the 43-year-old legal assistant.

“The store is just destructing itself,” Lewis said. “They’re going to lose sales if they lock up everything … It’s hard to not take it personally.”

Rite Aid, in response to this complaint, said it is “testing a range of product protection solutions to ensure merchandise is available to our customers.”

Heather Edelblute, 48, was once a frequent customer of the downtown West Chester Rite Aid. The West Chester University professor would usually stop in on her walk to and from work.

That changed a couple months ago, when she stopped finding the items she needed. When her children needed markers and poster board for a school project, her Rite Aid run was unfruitful. When she stopped in to buy the only toothpaste her daughter likes, they were out of stock. Even the candy and gum racks by the front register sat mostly empty, she noticed.

“When I would ask the staff, they’d say, ‘Well, the truck is coming next week,’” Edelblute said. “I just stopped going, because I couldn’t find what I needed.”

“It just looks like a store that is going out of business.”