By David Pinto
Bob Kwait, one of the legendary chain drug industry merchants of the 20th century, has embarked on an exciting new project: In cooperation with the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, Kwait is researching and writing a history of chain drug retailing in America.
Few people are more qualified than Kwait to record the many ways chain drug retailing has influenced and altered the buying habits of American consumers over the past century. His crowded resume includes stints at CVS (which, incidentally, he helped found) and Cleveland’s Gray Drug chain, tenures of varying lengths at drug chains throughout the Northeast, and contributions to the merchandising and marketing history of chain drug retailing which combined to give the industry a unique place in mass market retailing in the 20th century.
While Kwait furnishes and recreates the very real and industry-changing marketing and merchandising innovations that placed this merchant and his various employers atop the retailing community for so many years, in reaching out to NACDS for historical, statistical and personal background, he has found the ideal partner. For those who still require an education as to what NACDS has meant and represented in the chain drug community since its founding in the early years of the last century, this remarkably productive and influential organization has, in its way, molded the chain drug community into a unique and productive extension of its own vision of pharmacy retailing in America.
As a result, when the Kwait book appears, most likely in the first months of the new year, it will be required reading for anyone even remotely connected to our industry. And Kwait, ever loyal and helpful to the industry he helped create, will happily autograph copies for his many friends — as well as those industry people who, to their loss, never got to know him.
But this tribute to Bob Kwait has already run to an excessive length. And it’s really not about the book or its author. It’s about the National Association of Chain Drug Stores (a name that has become a misnomer now that its retail membership includes the most-relevant food and general merchandise retailers in America).
Clearly, with the accelerated pace of change in the U.S. mass retailing community, the time has come for the association to embark on its next venture. Here, in a sincere effort to help define that venture, is a small suggestion.
To this observer, what’s missing from the NACDS portfolio is the customer, the individual who, at the end of the day, determines the status of mass retailing in America. Indeed, every NACDS event or function throughout the calendar year involves the shopper. Too often, however, the customer remains silent at these events, a presence whose impact can only be imagined or guessed at or conjectured. How much more viable would NACDS be, and how much more valuable, if the association added the consumer to its already-impressive array of committees, adjuncts and extensions?
That’s not really a question. Rather, it’s a bit of unsolicited advice from an observer and, perhaps too often, a critic. How meaningful would it be if, at the next NACDS events, a permanent group representing the customer told the audience what was working — and what was not. It would be, in one person’s opinion, invaluable.
Submit Your Press Release
Have news to share? Send us your press releases and announcements.
Send Press Release
