Tracking Rite-Aid Store Closures

Rite-Aid closed 60+ stores in 2021. They said they’d nuke over 1,000 of them over three years, back in 2022. And, they’re now about to close ~500 due to bankruptcy.

FWIW Heyward Donigan, Former President and CEO — in 2023 — took home $1,043,713 in cash, $7,106,993 in equity, and $617,105 in “other” (total $8,767,811) for this fine, bankrupt leadership. Lots of other got lots too for being incompetent.

Rite-Aid is under no obligation to provide a list to the public, nor to do any overt announcements regarding the closures.

Each closure has the potential to create or exacerbate food and pharmacy deserts in many regions.

You can get individual stores (like this one), but there’s over 2,100 of them, so doing this manually is a non-starter.

Thus, I threw together a couple of R and bash scripts to help real data journalists out, in the event any of them can pry themselves away from the POTUS horse race.

One R script is to get the individual store URLs. The bash script is used to polittely get all 2,100+ store pages (I have a script I just re-use for things like this). The other R script is used to get the JSON that’s tucked away in the HTML files to get the store info, which includes latitude, longitude, store number, and address (there is more data in there, I just pulled those fields).

The map at the top of the post is just there for kicks.

The repo is also mirrored to my GitHub (sub out ‘hub’ for ‘lab’ in the URL) if you really need to bow down to Microsoft.