Business & Tech
After Bailing On Ohio And Michigan, Rite Aid Closes Completely
"All Rite Aid stores have now closed," the company's website says. "We thank our loyal customers for their many years of support."
October 13, 2025
A wave of pharmacy closures in Ohio and elsewhere appears to be deepening. Once the third-largest pharmacy chain in the United States, Rite Aid announced on its website that all of its stores are now closed.
Find out what's happening in Across Michiganfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
Health Care Dive reported the development on Oct.6. At the time of the closures, the chain was still operating more than 1,200 stores despite two bankruptcies, the news organization reported.
“All Rite Aid stores have now closed,” the company’s website says. “We thank our loyal customers for their many years of support.”
Find out what's happening in Across Michiganfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
Above the statement are buttons for now-former patrons to request their records and to find their new pharmacy if those records have been automatically transferred.
The closures are the latest blow to pharmacy access after years of complaints by independent and small-chain pharmacies. They have long claimed that middlemen owned by Fortune 15 health conglomerates have made their businesses unsustainable by sucking out all the profits.
Known as pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, the businesses decide which drugs are covered, negotiate non-transparent rebates with drugmakers, and decide how much to reimburse the pharmacies that had purchased and dispensed the drugs.
The three biggest PBMs control access to nearly 80% of patients. Their owners — UnitedHealth Group, CVS Health and Cigna-Express Scripts — also own top-ten insurers and pharmacies of their own. In other words, they decide how much to reimburse themselves as well as their competitors.
Critics say the system is rife with conflicts, and the Federal Trade Commission in January accused them of wild price hikes and possibly steering business to their own companies.
Big chains such as Rite Aid and Walgreens also are facing heavy competition from online retailers such as Amazon for business in front of the pharmacy counter.
In June 2024, during its first bankruptcy, Rite Aid announced that it would close hundreds of stores in Ohio and Michigan. Ohio Board of Pharmacy spokesman Cameron McNamee said that as of Wednesday, Rite Aid had no active licenses in Ohio.
The company’s former stores join a host of others closing up in Ohio.
When the board of pharmacy earlier this year unveiled a new tool to track closures, it revealed a sobering trend. Despite modest population growth, the number of pharmacies in the Buckeye State had dropped below 2,000 for the first time in memory.
The creation of pharmacy deserts — places where none is close by — are particularly hard and the poor and the elderly, and others for whom transportation is limited.
It doesn’t only make it harder for those people to get their medicine. They also lose access to the one medical professional they can talk regularly to about chronic conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure.
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