Independent pharmacy now open in East Pierce County touts a ‘better way’
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Hart Family Pharmacy opened in mid-October in Graham Town Center.
- Pharmacy offers vaccines, medication flavoring, contraception counseling, delivery.
- Hart seeks broad insurer networks; currently Humana, UHC, L&I, ProviderOne.
With the recent news of pharmacy closures as a result of Rite Aid’s bankruptcy, a local independent pharmacist is going against the grain.
Darren Hart opened Hart Family Pharmacy in mid-October. The pharmacy, in the Graham Town Center (shopping center next to Safeway), is the culmination of years of work toward opening his own business.
Hart graduated from the University of Montana in 2013 and became a pharmacy manager at Target in Tukwila before CVS took it over. He then was with CVS and later managed different drugstores in the area, including a brief period with Walgreens.
In 2023, he decided to start planning to open his own drugstore.
“I’m hoping for two things, one, to show people a different way of doing pharmacy that’s not like the national pharmacies where they don’t have time, they’re short staffed, everything like that,” he told The News Tribune in a recent interview. “So we have time, and we’ll show them a better way.”
As for the second thing, “For the people who are dissatisfied, they now have another option that they might not otherwise know about.”
Special services offered at the pharmacy include vaccines, medication flavoring, contraceptive counseling, smoking cessation and test-to-treat for flu and COVID-19. They also provide delivery within a 10-mile radius.
He’s already gained a few customers from his national competitors as Rite Aid and its subsidiary Bartell Drugs closed, and CVS acquired over 64 Rite Aid locations in Washington, Idaho and Oregon, including 20 Washington Bartell sites. CVS also acquired prescriptions from about 625 Rite Aid locations across 15 states. Others prescriptions were sold to stores in the Albertsons and Kroger chain of grocery stores with pharmacies, as well as Walgreens.
“I‘ve had people transfer in from those places because they didn’t want to be with Walgreens, they didn’t want to be with CVS, and so they’re giving us a try,” he said.
As a new pharmacy, he cautioned it is taking some time to get into various insurance networks. The pharmacy as of now takes Humana, UnitedHealthcare, L&I and ProviderOne and is in the process of adding more.
Caremark and Express Scripts could be added to the list in the next few weeks, he noted. “It’s a lot of red tape, especially for a new pharmacy starting out,” Hart said.
He said that he intends to have a “full range of as many network plans as I can.
“In Graham specifically, 57% of the residents have private insurance. So it’s really important for me to have a broad spectrum of insurance plans for them, along with Medicare and Medicaid.”
More information
Hart Family Pharmacy
Address: 9915 224th St. E., Suite 212, Graham
Contact: 253-434-4034, info@hartfamilypharmacy.com
Website: hartfamilypharmacy.com
This story was originally published October 29, 2025 at 5:15 AM.
