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Pilgrim Pharmacy is celebrating 50 years of service to the community under the ownership of Ray Macioci.Photo by Marina Samuel<\/p>\nTucked beneath the Buhre Avenue station on the 6 train sits a store that feels like a step back in time.\n<\/p>\n
Pilgrim Pharmacy, identified by a nostalgic red neon \u201cDrugs\u201d sign, is a rarity in an era when a trip to the pharmacy often means locked merchandise, long lines and too few employees. Instead, the brightly lit store is filled with customers \u2014 many of them regulars \u2014 chatting with staff members who have spent years, and in some cases decades, working there.<\/p>\n
Inside, Pilgrim blends old-fashioned customer service with modern conveniences. Behind the pharmacy counter, employees know not only their customers, but often their families as well.<\/p>\n
Pilgrim Pharmacy is celebrating 50 years of service to the community under the ownership of Ray Macioci.Photo by Marina Samuel<\/p>\n
The pharmacy was founded in 1934 by Wilfrid Scher, who owned and operated the business for 42 years before selling it in 1976 to Ray Macioci and his former business partner, Roger Paganelli.<\/p>\n
Macioci\u2019s path to ownership began long before that. As a teenager growing up in the Bronx, he worked in two neighborhood pharmacies before graduating from Fordham College of Pharmacy in 1971. After working for Paganelli at Mount Carmel Pharmacy, he took the leap into ownership just five years after graduation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWatching what my previous employers and mentor did as a routine kind of whet my appetite for wanting to own,\u201d Macioci said. \u201cSo, five years after I graduated, I became the owner of Pilgrim.\u201d<\/p>\n
Macioci\u2019s current business partner and co-owner, Michael Coscia, also got his start in the business as a teenager, delivering medications and working around the store beginning in 1987. The two became business partners in 2002.<\/p>\n
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A Christmas photo of Pilgrim Pharmacy staff from 1988. Photo by Marina Samuel<\/p>\n
While Pilgrim serves customers from across the Bronx, it has also maintained relationships with longtime patrons who have moved away. The pharmacy even conducts seasonal outreach to residents of City Island, which no longer has its own pharmacy.<\/p>\n
The pharmacy\u2019s longevity has required adapting to changing community needs. Pilgrim supplied medications during the early years of the HIV\/AIDS epidemic and continues to do so today. Decades later, the pharmacy opened a COVID-19 testing center and administered vaccinations during the pandemic.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has very much of that family atmosphere that you associate with a mom-and-pop pharmacy, but it\u2019s still mobile enough to cater to the ever-changing needs of pharmacy,\u201d Coscia said.<\/p>\n
Over the past five decades, Macioci has watched independent pharmacies steadily disappear as national chains expanded their footprint.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I first got to Pilgrim in 1976, there were about seven or eight independent pharmacies in the immediate area,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re not there anymore. It\u2019s a tough industry.\u201d<\/p>\n
One challenge facing independent pharmacies, Macioci and Coscia said, is the growing influence of pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs \u2014 middlemen that negotiate drug prices, determine which medications are covered by insurance and decide how pharmacies are reimbursed. Three companies \u2014 OptumRx, Express Scripts and CVS Caremark \u2014 dominate the industry<\/a>, handling approximately 79% of prescription claims in the United States.<\/p>\n
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Fully stocked shelves of prescriptions behind the counter at Pilgrim Pharmacy. Photo by Marina Samuel<\/p>\n