AH Pharmacy: Part of the Community for 50 Years

573

AH Pharmacy: Part of the Community for 50 Years

By John Burton
ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS ­– Richard P. Stryker and Scott Eagleton are decidedly old school in the many ways they operate Bayshore Pharmacy – and that’s the way they like it.
Stryker and Eagleton are the pharmacists and co-owners of the business, where both have worked for much of their lives.
“We do things for the most part the way my father did them,” said Stryker whose dad established and ran the pharmacy at 2 Bayshore Plaza, Highway 36, for many years.
The establishment is celebrating its 50th anniversary next month.
“You have to take care of people,” first and foremost while always remembering that the business and its owners are part of the community, Stryker learned from his father.
The two current partners said they continue to stress that point of view, offering their services to their customers and contributing to the community as a whole.
“They come in and we take care of them, I hope,” Stryker said.
In addition, the staff, he noted, regularly offer their time and volunteer for worthwhile organizations of their choosing. The pharmacy also regularly works with the United Methodist Church of Atlantic Highlands’ food bank by regularly contributing nonfood items, which would not be available to purchase with food stamps.
The attitude of not just being a business but a part of the community has contributed greatly to the pharmacy’s longevity, the partners believe.
Bayshore Pharmacy will hold a 50th anniversary celebration on Saturday, Nov. 8. The event will feature entertainment, giveaways and music and will serve as a way of acknowledging the community, customers and former employees who have made it possible for the pharmacy – the only one located in Atlantic Highlands – to continue for half a century.
Stryker’s father and uncle, Richard C. Stryker and Joseph McDonald, opened the then 1,800-square-foot pharmacy, when the shopping center was built on Highway 36. The elder Stryker lived in Atlantic Highlands for many years, serving on many committees including the harbor commission. He also was elected mayor. “He was involved in so much here,” his son said.
The elder Stryker still contributes, working there a couple of nights a week.
The pharmacy moved and expanded a couple times within the plaza and is now located at its northern end, next to the Foodtown supermarket. It is about 7,300 square feet and contains a wide assortment of items, including locally themed gifts.
Richard P. Stryker, who is now 49, “almost always” worked in his dad’s business, starting when he was only 6 or 7. His mother would drop him off while she went food shopping next door, he recalled.
“I would put things out in the wrong spots,” on the shelves he could reach, he said.
Eagleton, who is now 59 and has lived in Middletown for all his life, started working as the store’s delivery boy and clerk in 1977 when he was in college. He decided to become a pharmacist because the elder Stryker and others here “showed me the way,” he said.
They instilled in him an appreciation for what an independently owned pharmacy means for the community, he said. “I never wanted to work in a chain store. I always wanted to work in an independent.”
When he was younger, Eagleton said he was an intern with one of the drugstore chains. He found it “too constricting,” in the corporate structure. More importantly for him, it was “not customer-oriented.
“It was just about making money,” he said.
To compete now with the seemingly growing number of drugstore chain locations, Eagleton and Stryker belong to a cooperative group that can buy items in bulk, allowing the participating independents to offer prices that are in line with what the chains charge, Stryker said.
Their big advantage is that they “always try to know all of our patients and their families,” Stryker said. That means oftentimes knowing the patients’ doctors and staff, working with them and with the insurance companies to try and ensure the patients get the medications they need as soon as possible, so they can begin to get better.
“You’re job isn’t complete until they’re getting better,” he said.
The business has changed over the years, even since the younger Stryker and Eagleton took over in 1997, and certainly from the days when the elder Stryker would individually mix medications by hand from compounds.
“It’s gotten more complicated” with addressing the requirements of insurance providers and government regulations, Eagleton said.
For Stryker, one of the biggest changes he’s seen is how drugstores are playing a larger role in primary health care, providing more medical equipment and offering preventive vaccinations. Pharmacists will even visit some of their elderly and infirmed patients to make sure they get the needed immunizations, he said.
“It’s become more about health care” as it should be, Stryker said.
That belief was behind the decision in 2006 to stop selling cigarettes and other tobacco products. “It just didn’t seem right” to fill prescriptions for inhalers for emphysema patients while continuing to sell those products.
But what does continue to seem right is the reception he receives walking along the town’s First Avenue business district.
“We spend a lot of time saying hello,” he said, “and that’s nice.”