SHELF OBSESSED

While the name "pharmacy" denotes a place involved in the activity of distributing pharmaceuticals, which is typically the main income source for businesses of this type, there are lots of other things your particular pharmacy may do besides drug dispensing. This includes the sale of various types of retail items, from perfumes and cosmetics to food products, greeting cards, magazines, baseball caps, reading and sunglasses or, really, anything else that would likely sell off a store shelf.

Lighting is an important factor in the creation of any pleasing retail shopping environment, and your pharmacy design will definitely benefit from learning how to properly use lighting to attract customers into your store and help to provide them with a pleasant shopping experience while they're there. A customer who has a warm, friendly feeling while visiting your pharmacy will naturally want to stay longer, meaning they'll probably spend more money and will be likely to come back again.

There are many different career paths a practicing pharmacist may take, including:

• Community pharmacy
• Clinical pharmacy
• Hospital pharmacy
• Ambulatory care pharmacy
• Consulting pharmacy
• Hospice pharmacy
• Academic pharmacy

...and at least a dozen others.

The colors utilized in your pharmacy design are a key element in creating the type of emotional impact you want to have on your customers. It starts with your outside entrance and carries on as your visitors come through the door. Whether your store is located in a mall or out on the street, your customers will likely have just a moment to notice you and be attracted to what you have to offer. The use of colors can be a big part of this attraction. Here are some tips for using color to create an attractive and emotionally compelling pharmacy design:

Today's best-designed independent pharmacies are a far cry from their big-box, chain store competition for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the flexibility they incorporate into their pharmacy design. Great design brings the environment of a pharmacy to life, creating a welcoming feeling to those who visit and a comfortable and efficient place for staff members to spend their days. The creation of a safe, warm, and inviting shopping experience can be fostered through the use of attractive lighting, including natural light brought into your space through the installation of skylights or windows on exterior walls. Pleasing colors can be utilized for walls, fixtures and signage, and even the addition of some attractive, non-pollinating greenery can produce a relaxing effect on customers.

Everything seems to be changing so rapidly these days, especially where technology is concerned, and pharmacy design is no different. New shelving and fixtures have been developed in the last few years that, when replacing old and tired pharmacy shelving, can make a world of difference in how things look in your store as well as how well they sell. The psychology of drugstore sales is an area that shows promise regarding the subliminal responses of customers to your store layout, and much sales success has been tied to pharmacy design, including the style and placement of shelves and fixtures.

Although the sale of prescription drugs is the number one revenue generator in most drug stores, your independent pharmacy can be much more than just a place where people come to have their medication prescriptions filled. It's also where they can come to find food supplements and vitamins, food products, over-the-counter medications, convenience items, household items, health and beauty aids, souvenirs, gifts, and much more. Knowing how to promote the sale of these front end retail items can greatly improve your store's bottom line, and it's our purpose to help you do that with some proven tips to increase merchandise sales.

Pharmacy layout design is an incredibly important factor in overall store efficiency, both in the front-end retail merchandising area as well as in the back-end prescription filling section. Anything that can be done to streamline prescription filling processes should be seriously considered if efficiency is a primary goal in the improvement of your dispensing operations. Pharmacy staff should ask themselves exactly what they hope to accomplish through a pharmacy layout refit, such as improving current workflow, and what can be done to save time and improve customer satisfaction regarding the services being received.

Things are changing in the world of modern pharmacy design and layout, partly as a result of studies citing that drug store customers prefer certain things to be provided during their shopping experiences. Retail spending continues at a steady clip by drug store customers and, while the substitution of generics for higher priced prescription medicines has helped contain costs somewhat in the industry, an aging population causing a greater overall demand for medications continues to fuel growth.

As a neighborhood pharmacy owner, you’ve no doubt become accustomed to your store’s general layout and atmosphere. If you’ve gathered a good collection of regular customers over the years, you can bet they’ve also become used to your store’s overall persona and may even typically ignore many of your store displays, especially if those displays haven’t been updated for some time. If your pharmacy layout is pretty much the same as it was a decade or so ago, with few adaptations to incorporate the modern era of pharmacy design, it may be driving some of your customers "crazy," – or worse yet, driving them into the stores of your competition.