Walgreens set to take over Elephant Pharmacy space

October 29, 2010 7:00 am by Tracey Taylor

Walgreens looks set to take over the building at 1607 Shattuck Avenue which was formerly the home of Elephant Pharmacy before it filed for bankruptcy and closed its Berkeley and other Bay Area stores in February 2009.

Although Walgreens would not confirm to Berkeleyside that it has its eye on the building, several independent sources close to the deal verified that the drugstore giant will be moving in. A contractor who wishes to remain anonymous says he was asked to assess the building for Walgreens, and several remodeling permits for the address have been approved by the City of Berkeley.

The departure of the independently owned Elephant Pharmacy — whose focus on alternative medicine and strong design ethic were deemed a complementary fit in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto neighborhood — had a significant impact on retail sales in the North Shattuck area.  As previously reported on Berkeleyside, sales in that area have fallen by 19.1% over the past two years, largely due to the closing of the pharmacy.

32 Comments

Print Friendly
Tagged ,
  • Diane

    I don’t get it. They are now located a block and a half from there. Are they relocating? Seems useless to have 2 stores so close.

  • foo

    Gah! NO!

  • http://trampleasure.net/lee Lee Trampleasure

    sales in that area have fallen by 19.1% over the past two years, largely due to the closing of the pharmacy.

    Hmm. Aren’t we in a recession. Isn’t that perhaps a larger reason why sales have fallen than the closing of a pharmacy?

  • Alex

    Diane – you’re probably thinking of the CVS? The closest Walgreens is downtown at Shattuck & Allston.

  • CJ Higley

    Dear Elephant: Please forgive me for all the times I made fun of you during your brief, earnest life here in Berkeley. I hope you know my teasing was all in good fun! I never realized just how much I’d miss you. I loved your $1 offbeat indie DVDs and your reasonably priced Strauss Family Farms dairy products. Maybe I didn’t need your Super Blue-Green Algae, but someone did… probably. I still wear the hemp hat you sold me all the time! You were [almost] the Berkeley General Store we sorely needed. R.I.P Elephant. Your candle burned out long before your legend ever will.

  • Diane

    @Alex: Oh yes, I am. Still seems like they will cannibalize from each other, which may have been some of the problem with Elephant and Longs.

  • chip

    I miss the sporting goods store that used to be there. Haha – I’m probably the only one to say that! (Was it Copelands or Big 5?) I bought many a backpack and socks and shoes there. Now I must venture farther out for such things.

  • Tim Dewey-Mattia

    CJ – so true. Great post.

  • Alan Tobey

    Thus we learn again the prices we pay when a national chain store replaces a (unfortunately unsuccessful) local player: 1) needless retail duplication in the name of “competition” only 0.9 miles from their own nearest store 2) a focus on “low prices,” which in many cases just means “cheap goods,” in a neighborhood where carefully-considered quality is the more common goal.

    While Berkeley does need more places to buy our daily needed stuff, this superfluous addition is not the answer. I won’t be patronizing such unneeded redundancy in the name of “convenience,” and hope the project will prove a flop.

  • http://www.preservenet.com Charles Siegel

    Chip, it was Copelands. The entire chain has gone bankrupt.

  • Christine

    Noooo! I was still holding out hope that we’d get a reincarnated elephant!

  • Josiah

    Unlike some major national chains, Walgreen’s has never struck me as having ANY interest in meeting the needs/standards of its immediate neighbors and “tweaking” its offerings to accommodate those needs/standards. (Trust me: I lived in Chicago for several years where there is a Walgreen’s on nearly every other corner.) Thus, we will have the same items on offer at ALL THREE SHATTUCK AVENUE locations — there’s already one downtown, and another just across the parking lot from Berkeley Bowl.

    Scary.

  • http://www.berkeleyhomes.com/blog Ira Serkes

    I still miss the Co-op Hardware store.

    Something definitely underway .. Pipespy was working on site the other day; it looked like they were replacing the sewer lateral (connection from building to the sewer line)

  • Maureen Burke

    Thank you CJ for your wonderful post. I made fun too (all those cosmetics!) and now I miss the $1 dvds and the bulk herbs and the packaged Indian food a lot. I’m not much of a shopper, but I dropped money there on a regular basis. Rats. Their demise would provide a great business school case study of what went wrong when they expanded too fast. It does make me realize I’d better shop at Mr. Mopps (flying toys please!) and Pegasus on a regular basis.

  • Geech

    How many damn chain drug stores do we need? Jeebus.

  • http://www.wordyard.com Scott Rosenberg

    It’s not about candy bars and toothpaste. Pharmacies make tons of money on prescriptions, and Walgreens is in a war with CVS to snag a few more percentage points of that profit.

    We Berkeley citizens are just innocent bystanders. But you can always try to patronize an independent pharmacy when you can find one (their ranks are dwindling).

  • http://www.preservenet.com Charles Siegel

    Note that the iconic Times-Square kiss on V-J day was in front of a Walgreens. You can see the Walgreens sign at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kissing_the_War_Goodbye.jpg Walgreens recently reopened in that same location.

    More history to Walgreens (founded in 1901) than to CVS (founded in 1963). I also find Walgreens a bit less sterile than CVS.

  • http://stefanco.com Stefan Lasiewski

    I miss Elephant (they carried aspirin *and* whole wheat diapers). But, Berkeley needs the business. We lost several large businesses during the recession (Elephant, Iceland Ice Rink), and it’s good to get some businesses back into those empty storefronts.

    A newly designed Walgreens might be nicer then the old dirty crusty Walgreens at Gilman. Maybe they’ll paint it sky blue :)

  • Alan Tobey

    I don’t think it’s the case that the new Walgreen’s will add NEW business to Berkeley, just mostly spread the existing “pharmacy” (in actuality more like convenience store) business among a larger-by-one collection of stores.

    It’s not as if customers decided to drive off into the suburbs for their “pharmacy” needs after Elephant closed — not when they could make the arduous trek by foot to CVS an entire block and a half away. Nor did many suburbanites drive in for the Elephant Experience, not even the “Ladies who Lunch” that take taxis from BART to Chez Panisse for fear of actually walking our mean downtown streets.

  • Annie

    NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

  • John Seal

    If Elephant had stocked bran diapers in addition to the whole wheat variety they might still be in business.

  • http://www.510families.com RookieMom Heather

    Boo.

  • deirdre

    CJ: well said. Elephant was the BEST place to go for holiday gifts for my more eccentric relatives.

  • Still Mourning Elephant

    Stefan: Yes, sky blue. And with a reincarnated (Walgreen) inflatable Elephant, on the roof. Progress can be fun.

  • teepeeok

    Yuck! Dis-like!

  • wanderer

    I’m never happy to see a business go under, though Elephant wasn’t exactly local, more like a small Northern California chain. But it was one of the least friendly stores I ever encountered, when I went in there I felt like I (and my wallet) were judged wanting. I just wasn’t cool enough to go Elephant. And they prescribed yoga–oh goodie, who needs a pharmacy to prescribe yoga. Not to mention that there’s been a lot of information about how they ruthlessly exploited their workers.

  • vnm

    As though it wasn’t bad enough for the Elephant to die. No store could stimulate my olfactory system as did Elephant Pharm. I couldn’t afford much of their stuff – but loved to sense-shop.

  • Ephemerol*29

    Oh, no, not Walgreens! Prepare for hoards of drug addicted and sleazy street people bolted to the sidewalks out in front, clouds of cigarette smoke and booze, along with glazed minimum wage teen employees who appear perpetually lost and disengaged. Let’s see if they “rip” out the very expensive natural overhead lighting system that Elephant installed and turn it into a sterilized zombie, cubical droid experience that offers electric shock treatments for free on the first Friday of the month. There is only “one” way to neutralize this neighborhood box store invasion and that is to force Andronico’s to finally ‘give in’ to the offers from ‘Whole Foods’ to buy their entire series of out of date and now fully broken and thus vacant stores. Next comes Safeway! Take it to the ground and after crushing it into powder, bring in the new Berkeley Bowl North!

  • Ode

    I can think of two good things about Walgreens taking over the Elephant Pharm space:

    * The empty store has been a blight and empty spaces generally affect everything in the area, so it will be good to have real commerce again in that space.

    * CVS is the single worst corporate pharmacy in history and are probably owned and operated by Beelzebub himself. (This is, of course, just an opinion.)

    I hope that Walgreens will be sensitive to the neighborhood, revive some of the very good things that Elephant Pharm represented, and thrive. And in the process, force that CVS right the hell back to its cut-rate supplements roots in Podunk where it belongs. (With apologies to the good people of Podunk who don’t deserve such dreck either.)

  • Ephemerol*29

    Elephant would still be in full bloom today *if* it had focused fully and completely on the basics during our economic collapse i.e. food. If it had been renamed “Elephant Foods”, and it’s focus changed, it would be doing incredible business just as the new Trader Joe’s is now experiencing. What is so painful is to see so much potential at that corner fully destroyed by another box store, replete with it’s corporate formula and cheap candy bars etc. Damn these box stores! At least the Starbucks is now gone. I truthfully doubt that anyone will flock to Walgreens. CVS is fully horrid enough at times. These corporate box stores have no independence and are just forced to carry out the game plan from HQ. Maybe they have also changed their minds and will pass on this location. Let’s pray!

  • DC

    The problem is the footprint. That space is far too large for a normal mom & pop kind of store, and it was too large for Elephant. It would be better divided up into smaller, leasable sub-spaces but that would be a pretty big zoning change. As it stands only large stores can make a go of it there. Few of those are local these days.

  • http://notdavemurray.com dave

    although a littl esmall i thought at least a wholefoods (or 3/4 foods) would have fit nicely. walgreens?? what a waste. i too made fun of elephant and spent way too much money there. however – i wish they remained.