Inside Purdy’s pill-packing powerhouse, where prescriptions are a family affair

In the Lake Kathryn shopping center just across the Purdy bridge, where the road crooks like an elbow to start its long run down the Key Peninsula, there’s a perfectly ordinary-looking local drugstore.

It has a generic name — Cost Less — and shelves bulging with nail polish, dish soap and fishing tackle, the staples of rural life.

“A lot of people like coming here because it reminds them of an old-time pharmacy,” says Don Zimmerman, 77, the longtime owner. “We still deliver prescriptions at night, just like we did in the beginning.”

The homey image is misleading. In a crowded back room behind that mom-and-pop facade is a pharmaceutical powerhouse — a pill factory where a row of pharmacists — and a clattering robot — fill as many as 900 prescriptions a day for customers all over the state.

Over the years, the unassuming Purdy Cost Less has become the pharmacy of last resort for people who can’t afford expensive prescriptions or don’t have good insurance. The little store by the bridge beats the big-box stores on price for most of the 80 or 90 most-popular drugs it stocks in bulk, its owners say.

“Men come from all over for Tadalafil and Sildenafil,” the generic versions of the erectile drugs Viagra and Cialis, said Allison Zimmerman, Don’s daughter-in-law. Metformin, a drug used by diabetics, is also popular, as well as Gabapentin, a non-opioid pain-killer.

Cheapest in the state

Zimmerman said he realized early on that many people on the Key Peninsula don’t have a lot of money, so if he was to survive, he had to keep his prices low. He did it, he says, by “filling more prescriptions an hour than anyone else, working 60 hours a week, skipping lunch, not taking breaks.”

“One day about 10 years ago, someone came into the store and said, “Don, you’re on TV!’ “ Zimmerman recalled. “It turns out some TV station had done a survey, and we were the cheapest pharmacy in the state.”

These days, the store does a large mail-order business, and Zimmerman trolls the websites of the big discount wholesalers, looking for the best deals. He’ll switch suppliers on a dime, Allison says, for a better price. He’s also part of a regional network — his son, Drew, calls it an “independent chain” — of rural and small-town pharmacies that pool their buying power. There are other Cost Less pharmacies in Federal Way, Fircrest and on Military Road.

He’s vocal about the poor reimbursements that pharmacies get from HMOs and Medicare.

“I fill an average of 240 prescriptions a day,” he said. “Five years ago, I was making $5 a prescription. Today I make 15 cents. Most people wouldn’t stoop over on the sidewalk to pick up 15 cents.”

A polymath who worked his way through pharmacy school as a blackjack dealer, Zimmerman can tell you to the penny the markup on a drug he sold 25 years ago.

“Back when I started, gasoline was just 20 cents a gallon,” he recalled. “There was a drug I was selling for $1.47. Well, K-Mart had it for 99 cents. So I used to drive to K-Mart to buy and still made money.”

Hoarder’s paradise

Zimmerman started his store 40 years ago at the Bridgeway Market in Purdy, on the other side of the bridge. He grossed all of $22 the first day, he recalled, and had to spend twice that much on tire chains, because it snowed.

The early store was “like a hoarder’s paradise,” recalls Dr. William Roes, a Key Center physician who’s known Zimmerman for years. “Narrow aisles. shelves packed with every conceivable thing.”

The store also sold liquor.

Zimmerman had to write to the governor — he forgets whether it was Al Rosellini or Dan Evans — to get his liquor license after the liquor board turned him down.

“They told me they’d give me the license if I promised not to write the governor again,” he recalled, chuckling. “The day I got my liquor license, my gross went up 33 percent, and stayed there.”

In 1984, with another druggist, Gary Bisceglia. and a local named Mike Salatino, who ran a fruit stand, he started what would become the Lake Kathryn shopping center. Over the years, the center would expand to include a grocery and seven other stores, including a Burger King.

A leap of faith

“It was a huge leap of faith for him, making that investment,” said Roes. “He really jump-started the whole retail economy this side of the bridge. He’s done an amazing job creating jobs. That Burger King, for instance, was the first fast-food restaurant on the Key Peninsula.”

In 2002, some of Zimmerman’s longtime customers began to transition to nursing homes, and Zimmerman thought they were being gouged on medications.

“It made me so mad. If they needed a bottle of aspirin, the nursing home would charge $30,” he said. “They were just gouging.”

So he started Cost Less Senior Services, which now provides low-cost prescriptions to hospitals, jails and prisons, nursing homes and other institutions. It’s in an unmarked building next to the pharmacy and run by Zimmerman’s son, Drew.

Today, the combined businesses employ between nine and 10 pharmacists and keep three robotic filling machines going. The Purdy store was the first pharmacy in the state to receive permission to use the robots.

“Each of the robots can fill about 300 prescriptions a day, which is the equivalent of a full-time pharmacist,” Allison Zimmerman said.

Counting pills

On any given day there are still four to five pharmacists working the line, and if you look closely, you’ll see that one of them— the tall guy in the half-glasses, counting pills into bottles faster than the eye can follow — is Don Zimmerman, still filling prescriptions by hand.

“I’ve cut it down to a couple of days a week,” says Zimmerman, “but I still enjoy the work. It’s satisfying.”

“I’ve never known anyone to work harder than Don,” said Roes, his old friend. “Here he is at 77, still standing behind the counter counting pills.”

In 2018, Zimmerman made the news when, at the age of 74, he tackled a masked robber who tried to steal codeine-laced cough syrup. There’s still a video on YouTube that shows the security camera footage.

“If you come into his store and ask for something, he’ll give it to you,” Roes said. “But don’t try to steal from him.”

Baked goods and fishing trips

Zimmerman doesn’t like to talk about it, but he’s also well known on the Key Peninsula for his soft heart.

“If people couldn’t pay for their medicine, he give it to them,” Roes said. “There are so many stories. He’d go in on Sunday to open up the store. If someone ran out of blood pressure pills, he’d say, ‘Here’s three, but call Doc Roes in the morning.’”

Every year until COVID hit, he’d take the whole store on a fishing trip up to LaPush.

“I love that man. I’ve never met anyone more compassionate,” said Stephanie Flintoff, who was the store’s buyer until a few months ago. “There are stories about him just opening his wallet and giving people cash.”

His customers loved him back, she said.

“Every Christmas, they would bring in so many cakes and pies and cookies you could hardly get into the break room,” Flintoff said. “One customer would bring pizza once a week. Another would bring cinnamon rolls or ice cream bars.”

Old-timers would gather in the store to gab at “Uncle Don’s.” They still do.

“It’s good we never hung out a ‘no loitering’ sign,” said Drew Zimmerman.

Never saw a paycheck

For himself, Zimmerman is an admitted penny-pincher. For years, he said, he drove “the oldest car in the parking lot,” a Dodge Dart with 640,00 miles on it.

“For 50 years, I never saw a paycheck,” he said. He turned over his earnings to his wife, Kathryn — the namesake of the shopping center — and she paid the bills.

“One day she decided we needed a bigger house, so she went out and bought one,” he said. “I’d never seen it. I had to come from work to find out where I lived.”

Kathryn Zimmerman died last year at 70. About the same time, Don Zimmerman was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He decided to slow down. In November, Drew and Allison Zimmerman bought the business.

“He didn’t want to sell out to a chain,” said Drew Zimmerman. “So we decided to keep it in the family.”

A family affair

“At first, I was not on board,” said Allison, a former teacher with a master’s degree who was enjoying being “an over-educated mom.”

Today she’s ankle deep in the business, working mainly in the front end, with the shelves of hunting gear, gift cards and sundries.

“You want bear spray, you want plungers, we’ve got it all,” she said. “The store is 12,000 square feet of anything you can imagine.“

Drew’s not a pharmacist, and neither is Allison, but both have pharmacology in their blood.

“My dad, Al Linggi, and Don Zimmerman went to pharmacy school together at the University of Washington,” said Allison Zimmerman. “When Drew and I were kids, they worked together at Harold Meyer’s drugstore in Tacoma, and that’s how we met. We sort of grew up in drugstores.”

At the entrance to the store, next to the gumball machines and the potted plants, is a hand-carved sign that could be the family motto. It reads: “Dreams don’t work unless you do.”

Reach Kerry Webster at editor@gateline.com

This story was originally published January 27, 2021 at 5:30 AM.