Health History | CVS — The Consumer Value Store on Merrimack Street
· 1963-5
Unreviewed contributionBy kevin · · updated · Report an issue
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Health History | CVS — The Consumer Value Store on Merrimack Street
kevin
People treat CVS Health as a Woonsocket holding company that was always a national pharmacy chain.
The first room was a health-and-beauty shop in downtown Lowell.
On 9 May 1963 Stanley Goldstein, his brother Sidney, and partner Ralph Hoagland opened the first Consumer Value Store on Merrimack Street. The Goldsteins already ran Mark Steven Service Merchandisers, a firm that stocked grocery aisles with toiletries. The store was the next step: sell the same goods under their own banner.
The name was literal. Consumer Value Stores sold health and beauty products at a discount, without a pharmacy counter. The initials CVS appeared on the shield logo a year later, in 1964, when the chain had grown to 17 shops.
The mechanism was inventory discipline borrowed from rack jobbing. The brothers knew which SKUs moved in New England groceries. They put those SKUs on their own shelves and cut the middleman.
Pharmacy departments arrived only in 1967, in Warwick and Cumberland, Rhode Island, not in the Lowell room. In 1969 the Goldsteins sold the 40-store chain, then doing about 20 million dollars a year, to Melville Corporation and stayed to run it.
The support center in Woonsocket broke ground in 1981. By the 25th anniversary in 1988 CVS reported nearly 750 stores and sales of about 1.6 billion dollars.
The first address sat in the Hildreth Building, the 1884 Queen Anne block on Merrimack Street. That CVS closed in July 2021 after a landlord dispute and moved prescriptions to Bridge Street. The pin is the 1963 sidewalk, not a surviving original interior.
Walk the street. The brick and brownstone are older than the chain. The first Consumer Value Store is gone from the ground floor.
Photo: John Phelan, Merrimack Street, Lowell, via Wikimedia Commons.
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