It didn’t take long for Debbie Clark to run into someone she knows during a recent visit at Pro Pharmacy in South St. Paul.

That’s typical for most longtime customers, she said.

“I just saw my old piano teacher and a school teacher who used to work with my mom,” Clark, 65, of South St. Paul said while at the checkout counter one afternoon this week. “It happens here all the time.”

On the other hand, she said, her stop was very much out of the ordinary.

Clark and other Pro Pharmacy customers are struggling to deal with news that the neighborhood drugstore is closing next week after nearly 40 years in business at Marie and Fifth avenues.

“It will be a big loss for a lot of people,” Judy Musil, 72, of Newport said after picking up prescriptions for her 95-year-old mother.

Owner Greg Schouweiler, one of the drug store’s four pharmacists, is selling the business to the Walgreens chain, which sought Pro Pharmacy’s customer database. The 63-year-old said he plans to work as a pharmacist at the Walgreens along Cahill Avenue in Inver Grove Heights “for a few more years.”

But Pro Pharmacy is not a Walgreens, customers say.

“Look around, and you can see it’s all about South St. Paul,” Musil said.

On the north side of the building’s exterior is a mural of South St. Paul’s history painted by local artist Robert Zins, complete with the stockyards, meat-packing plants and several bars of the past.

The pharmacy’s interior paint is maroon and white — the colors of South St. Paul High School, which is just up the street along Sixth Avenue.

Prominent at the front of the store is “Packer Power House,” with South St. Paul High School clothing and other merchandise for sale.

Fifties-era rock ‘n’ roll plays from the speakers.

“Except for when school gets out, our customers here are mostly older … and that’s the music that they want,” said cashier Crystal Warzecha of Hastings.

Pro Pharmacy dates back to 1923, when it was known as Gericke’s Pharmacy and operated across the street.

Schouweiler bought Gericke’s in November 1975 and in 1990 moved the business to its current location, the former Glewwe’s Grocery building.

Letting his customers know the pharmacy is shuttering “has been awful,” Schouweiler said. “I feel terrible. It’s going to be tough for the community.”

But, he added, “I haven’t paid myself in six months.”

When the doors close for good at 5 p.m. Tuesday, it will mark the first time since 1923 that a pharmacy will not be serving the neighborhood, nestled “on the hill” between Concord Street and U.S. 52 and made up of pockets of small businesses among mostly older single-family homes.

South St. Paul once had several independent pharmacies, including City Drug and Reid’s, but they all went by the wayside. Snyder’s was the most recent pharmacy to depart in 2009.

Moreover, just two independently owned pharmacies remain in Dakota County, according to the state Board of Pharmacy. They are Erickson Drug in Lakeville and Family Fresh Market Pharmacy in Farmington.

DYING BREED

Pro Pharmacy’s closure is line with a five-year statewide trend. Between 2009 and 2014, 135 “nonfranchised” pharmacies closed across the state, including 36 in the seven-county metro area.

As of July 2014, Minnesota had 334 nonfranchised pharmacies, 106 in the seven-county metro area.

Schouweiler blames his closing partly on slow insurance reimbursement and dropping reimbursement rates, which he said barely cover the cost of prescriptions and make it difficult to make a profit.

“We have about $350,000 sitting out from insurance companies,” he said. “And they’re reimbursing us at such low rate. I kept track of seven prescriptions we did the other day, and we lost $17 on them. It’s not a good situation.”

Sales of merchandise in the front of the store — gifts, greeting cards, groceries, soda and the like — do not bring in enough profit, said Schouweiler, who lives in Inver Grove Heights.

Schouweiler has been working 60-plus hours a week to make ends meet the past few years, said Greg’s wife, Nancy Schouweiler. Selling to Walgreens was not their first choice.

“We’ve had pits in our stomachs off and on for the last two months, wondering if we were doing the right thing or not,” said Nancy Schouweiler, who has been on the Dakota County Board of Commissioners since 1999. “We really wanted to be able to keep a pharmacy at that location, and that just didn’t work out. And we had to do what we could to get our money back in the business. Greg couldn’t keep working those hours.”

Erica Scofield, a pharmacy technician for 15 years, said employees and the older customers are taking the closing hard.

“All in all, it’s been emotional,” she said.

SCHOOL PROPERTY

Greg Schouweiler’s concern for the community has been evident throughout his sale, said Dave Webb, superintendent of South St. Paul schools, which owns the Pro Pharmacy space and operates next door.

As a part of his deal with Walgreens, Schouweiler had to agree that another pharmacy will not move into his location for the next five years, Webb said. To ensure this, he said, Schouweiler offered the school district five years’ worth of lease payments — worth a “couple hundred thousand dollars” — to reserve the space.

Schouweiler is also granting the district permission to use or sub-lease the space during the five years.

“Greg’s been a great member of the community for so long … and I think that shows just how generous he is,” Webb said.

Customer Gaylord Conrad said Pro Pharmacy is “part of the fabric of our business community.”

“For me, Walgreens is only about three quarters of a block from where I live, but I’m used to coming here,” Conrad, 67, said. “I’ve been coming here for years and years. They know my doctor, my nurses — everyone that I deal with in the medical profession. This drugstore is tradition in this town.”

Nick Ferraro can be reached at 651-228-2173. Follow him at twitter.com/NFerraroPiPress.