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Shoppers Drug Mart
Shoppers Drug Mart Corporation (TSX: SC) is Canada's
largest pharmacy chain with more than 900 stores operating under
the names Shoppers Drug Mart across Canada and Pharmaprix in Quebec
History
At the age of twenty, Murray Koffler inherited two Koffler's Drugs
pharmacies in suburban Toronto (one in the Don Mills Centre shopping
mall). By 1962, Koffler's had created a chain of 17 pharmacies,
which he renamed "Shoppers Drug Mart".
Pharmaprix logoKoffler revamped the concept of the
twentieth century “drug store” in Canada by removing
the soda fountain and emphasising the dispensary, requiring his
pharmacists to wear starched white coats as a symbol of their professionalism.
In the mid-1950s, he began acquiring other drug stores and organized
them around a then-novel franchising concept: pharmacist “associates”
would own and operate their own stores within the system and share
in the profits.
Old Shoppers Drug Mart logo on the signage of a Toronto
store.When Koffler retired in 1983, he sold the chain to Imasco,
formerly Imperial Tobacco, at that time Canada's largest tobacco
company.
In 2000, after Imperial Tobacco had been taken over
by BAT Industres (formerly British American Tobacco),
Shoppers was sold to a consortium of institutional investors
including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), Bain
Capital, Inc., DLJ Merchant Banking Partners, Charlesbank
Capital Partners LLC, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan
Board, CIBC Capital Partners, and Shoppers Drug Mart's
senior management and pharmacist/owners
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