“Change is never easy,” Bill Allegre said.
Allegre, former owner of Allegres Pharmacy and Briscoe Pharmacy and now staff pharmacist at Walgreens Pharmacy, said he has had to make many adjustments.
Allegre sold his two businesses to Walgreens in early 2010 after a long history.
Allegre said there was a pharmacy business in the Allegres building for 109 years and hewas the owner and operator for 28 years.
The Briscoe location was a pharmacy since the 1950s and he took over in 1996.
“Walgreens purchased the prescription files and medications,” Allegre said. “They came in and boxed everything up.”
Allegre said he thinks about 60 to 70 percent of his customers transferred with him to the new location.
“Some customers needed delivery and wanted the availability of charge accounts so they might have switched to Kramer Pharmacy,” Allegre said.
Some of his pharmacy technicians also moved with him.
Ottawa native Kayla Watts, pre-pharmacy major at University of Kansas, is one of those pharmacy technicians.
Watts worked at Allegres and Briscoe during school breaks for three years. She said there were some big changes when switching to Walgreens.
“There was a lot of new information I had to take in and the system of doing things is very different,” Watts said. “The technology was the hardest to get used to but it’s nice to have.”
OU Junior Ryan Huene, business administration and accounting majors, used Briscoe for many years before the switch.
He said although he liked using Briscoe, Walgreens has advantages.
“It will be nice when I travel,” Huene said. “If I need a prescription, I can go to any Walgreens and I can get it.”
Allegre, Watts and Huene all agreed that a major difference is the personal relationship between the customer and the pharmacist.
“The daily coffee drinkers and customers were like family,” Allegre said. “Now there is a lot less one on one interaction.”
“The personal contact I had at Briscoe is no longer there,” Huene said. “I don’t get prescriptions often, but it was nice to see a familiar face.”
Though Watts misses the face-to-face interaction, she said Walgreens offers people more options in prescriptions.
“There are more brands to offer people that we might have had to order at Briscoe or Allegres,” she said.
Walgreens Pharmacy is open Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., Saturday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The pharmacy offers auto fill, Internet refills, text alerts, a drive-thru pharmacy and flu shots.