Customers, employees lament coming closure of 118-year-old Hamilton pharmacy

“It’s horrible. The patients come in here crying,” said pharmacist Jim Fescina. “They’re in tears. And we’re all crying with them.

“These people have been coming here for 30 years. A lot of the people depend on us for price, because we don’t rip people off. Sometimes our prescription price might be $19 and they go to (a competitor), it’s $103. A huge difference on our price and everybody else’s.”

The pharmacy, which opened in 1903 when its building at 302 Main St. was built, delivers prescriptions without a charge and also helps customers with the often-complicated process of signing up for Medicare. He fears customers who have chosen Hughes as their pharmacy through the government sign-up process will have trouble changing to other pharmacies.

Owner John Piepmeier, who has owned Hughes since 1979 and operates another pharmacy in Glendale, received a notice they would be evicted at month’s end for failure to pay rent.

“I thought I was paying the rent,” Piepmeier said. “But I think it was about six months ago, they sent me a letter saying I owed them like $4,000. I didn’t even know about it, because they changed the rent on me and didn’t tell me.”

“They never said anything to me about what the original rent was,” he said. “I thought I was paying the original amount, but then they said there was all kinds of fees, and the rent wasn’t even included in what I was paying.”

Piepmeier used to own the building, but sold it to CORE for $300,000 in October, 2015, partly because maintaining the building, which was rundown at the time, “was too much of a hassle for me to handle,” he said.

About six months ago, CORE offered him $5,000 to help him relocate, but that wouldn’t have been enough to cover costs, he said. Also, at age 73, he didn’t want to relocate because opening a new drug-store location is very complicated, and, “because I’m too old to do that.”

Piepmeier thought the sale to CORE “was good at the time. I didn’t know they were going to kick me out after five years,” he said.

City Manager Joshua Smith referred questions about the situation to CORE. Its executive director, Mike Dingeldein, was unavailable prior to deadline.

“I used to own the building,” Piepmeier said. “I sold it to CORE, and they wanted to put an ice cream parlor (Village Parlor) in the front where we had the soda fountain. So they put a wall between the prescription department and the front of the store. It killed my business for quite a while because everybody thought we were out of business because of the construction and there was no signage or anything.”

“Right now, nobody’s sleeping because we’re going to be unemployed on Saturday,” Fescina said.