Last Local Drug Store Closes After 99 Years

Insurance pressures forcing end of pharmacies statewide

By Leslie Savisky
The Tube City Almanac
August 17, 2025
Posted in: McKeesport and Region News

The last drugstore in the McKeesport area has closed. Ayres Drugs on Walnut Street in Christy Park served customers for almost 100 years. (Leslie Savisky photo for Tube City Almanac)

Chuck Traeger graduated from Duquesne University as a pharmacist in 1955 and began working at Ayres Drug Store five years later. “I started on a Wednesday, and Mr. Ayres passed away that Friday,” Traeger said.

Traeger continued to work at the drug store on Walnut Street in Christy Park and, in the late 1960s, purchased it from Ayres’ son. Since then, the pharmacist has dedicated his life and career to serving the McKeesport community.

But all good things come to an end. So when Traeger’s pharmacy license needed to be renewed in August of 2025, the lifelong McKeesport resident, now 92 years old, made the tough decision not to renew his license and officially retire — citing age and the store’s profitability.

The closure leaves McKeesport, White Oak and the surrounding area with no drug stores, except for the pharmacy counters at two local Giant Eagles. All of the local Rite Aids recently closed as part of that chain’s bankruptcy.

Across Pennsylvania and the United States, drug stores are vanishing under the pressure put on them by pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs — the insurance companies through which many Americans pay for prescription drugs.

According to Fast Company, over the past 10 years, 30 percent of all of the drugstores in the U.S. have closed.

“The bottom line is drug costs are going up while reimbursement rates have not followed suit,” said Dustin Koll, a York County pharmacy manager for the last 15 years. “In 2006, the average margins used to be 12 to 15 percent. Currently, they’re at 6 to 8 percent.”

PBMs are the intermediaries between insurance companies and pharmacies. They say they are able to negotiate rebates from drug manufactuers and help patients get their prescriptions at an affordable cost. But they also cut into a pharmacy’s revenue, especially those of small, independent drug stores, through fees and fluctating reimbursement rates.

And there also are allegations that big PBMs favor giant chains, including ones that they own. One of the largest PBMs, CVS Caremark, is a subsidiary of CVS Health — which also owns the largest U.S. drugstore chain.

CVS Health, which purchased a competing PBM, AdvancePCS, in 2003, is the world’s second-largest health care company.

Experts who watch the pharmacy industry contend that the amount of money pharmacies receive doesn’t always cover the cost of a transaction, and sometimes pharmacies are actually losing money to fill customers’ prescriptions.

State Sen. Nick Pisciottano, a West Mifflin Democrat who sits on the state senate’s pharmacy caucus, said PBMs “play a huge role in what drugs will be available to consumers and how much family-owned pharmacies are reimbursed.

“These negotiations directly impact how much patients pay out of pocket, how much insurance will cover, and how much small pharmacies are reimbursed for dispensing medications,” said Pisciottano, who serves the 45th district, which includes McKeesport. “Pennsylvania has lost hundreds of independent pharmacies, creating pharmacy deserts across the state.”

There are now no pharmacies in neighboring communities such as Port Vue, Liberty, Glassport or Duquesne. With the closure of Ayres, residents will have to travel to a Walmart or Giant Eagle to fill their prescriptions, or mail-order them.

Ayres Drugs filled its last prescriptions on Friday. The rest of the store will close sometime this month.

(Leslie Savisky photo for Tube City Almanac)

Chuck Traeger’s daughter, Sara – a special education teacher at McKeesport Area High School – has fond memories of working at Ayres.

“We’ve been such a big part of the community for so long,” Sara Traeger said. “I grew up in the store. The customers were like family to us.”

Over the years, many competitors came calling — interested in buying the pharmacy’s prescription file and customer database — but the Traeger family always declined.

“My dad was never focused on the money,” Sara Traeger said. “He said he’d never sell out.”

The Traeger family, who lived upstairs when the doctor’s office closed, would stay open late, sometimes until midnight, if necessary.

Sara Traeger said, after closing up for the night, she, her brother, father and mom Rita Traeger would pile into the car and drive around to customers’ homes. “We were our own little delivery service,” Sara Traeger said.

The pharmacy was once the hub of the community; it had a jukebox, and the store served sodas, milkshakes and ice cream. Although like most businesses, Ayres struggled through the COVID-19 pandemic, it was able to rally and make it through. “It was tough with not having a drive-thru,” Sara Traeger said. 

But while Ayres Drug survived the pandemic, as well as the Great Depression, World War II, and the collapse of the steel industry, it couldn’t survive the current business environment nationally for drug stores.

“Financially, medication costs and insurance companies are literally killing the independent stores,” the Traegers posted on the store’s Facebook page.

While PBMs claim they lower costs for consumers, Pisciottano said their effectiveness has been called into question at the national level. “By design, PBMs could theoretically assist small pharmacies by streamlining billing, negotiating better drug prices and providing access to a larger pharmacy network of patients,” he said. 

However, Pisciottano said, “in practice, we are seeing a trend in which PBMs tend to favor larger chain pharmacies, leaving independent and family-owned pharmacists with lower reimbursements, more fees and limited leverage in negotiations.”

PBMs also charge independent pharmacies what are called “direct and indirect reimbursement fees,” or DIR, which are supposed to ensure that drug stores meet certain benchmarks set by Medicare.

“It’s basically a ‘pay-to-play’ fee,” Koll said.

Pharmacists say there is little transparency as to how PBMs calculate DIRs. PBMs can wind up clawing back a store’s profits and leaving them in debt.

Pisciottano said pharmacists also struggle with PBMs restricting patients from filling certain prescriptions at retail drug stores and steering them toward larger chains and away from local businesses, “which ultimately creates a market imbalance for local family-owned pharmacies struggling to compete.”

Between rates set by Medicare Part D — the federal prescription benefit for seniors — and PBMs, pharmacies can find themselves receiving wildly different reimbursements for the same drug, depending on the customer.

“Retroactive DIR fees can severely impact a pharmacy’s cash flow, sometimes forcing them to dispense medications at a loss when the final reimbursement ends up below the drug’s purchase price,” said Pisciotanno, adding that these reimbursement practices put small and independent pharmacists at a disadvantage.

“These fees are impossible to plan for and can greatly impact the small profit pharmacies make,” Pisciotanno said. 

Pennsylvania legislators are working on legislation that would address the problems that DIR fees are creating for drug stores, he said.

“DIR fees continue to place pressure on family-owned pharmacies and further policy solutions to reduce these fees and improve contract transparency are needed,” Pisciotanno said.

Stand-alone drug stores — versus pharmacies inside grocery stores and retail chains like Giant Eagle, Walmart or Target — have the biggest disadvantage since they aren’t seeing revenue from other parts of the store, like chains are.

“I think that any pharmacy that doesn’t have another business attached to it, such as a grocery store, is in trouble,” said Koll, who works for a large retail chain himself.

Ayres has sold its prescription files to Hayden’s Pharmacy in Youngwood, Westmoreland County, a small independent chain that has agreed to fill prescriptions by mail order for Ayres’ customers. Current customers should call (412) 672-3000 or 888-429-3367.

Many McKeesport area residents are older or low-income, and rely on public transit to do their shopping.

“There is nothing else here,” said Sara Traeger. “I wish I could pick up the store and take it anywhere.”

Leslie Savisky is a freelance writer and award-winning author from Penn Township. Find out more at https://linktr.ee/lesliesavisky

Originally published August 17, 2025.

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