[I always think of Duane Reade as the Drugstore That Ate New York. There are so many Duane Reades in NYC that, as Wikipedia notes, "in various neighborhoods ... there are from three to five Duane Reades within three city blocks of each other." In Rockefeller Center where I used to work, I always marveled at the two Duane Reades that virtually faced each other on opposite sides of the complex. Duane Read has thrived by heeding capitalism's Golden Rule: "Know Your Customer's Weaknesses ... and Exploit Them." Viz.:]
The Mystery of Duane Reade
The aisles are an obstacle course, the staff moves at glacial speed, and the prices aren’t even that low. So how did it become the only place you’d ever think to go for your tube of Aquafresh?
By Ian Mount
>From the June 6, 2005 issue of New York
Inside the Duane Reade on the corner of Delancey and Ludlow on the Lower East Side, a thick white guy in dusty construction boots ruminates on a display of Ben-Gay and its generic counterparts. “Didn’t know how much they cost,” he mutters as he puts one down and picks up another. “You gotta be kidding me!” he says finally, and stalks out past the dozen other shoppers reading product labels with the quiet deliberation of people considering books from an unknown author. The store looks disheveled and lived-in, as if it had grown organically through years of trial and error, not through anything as prosaic as a retail “planogram.” In the front window display, food is haphazardly stacked next to diapers and window cleaner, and, in a fit of absurdity, only one item has its price tagged: Johnson & Johnson baby powder, $2.99.
Duane Reade ought not to be successful. The prices aren’t particularly low and the staff isn’t particularly helpful. And the often cramped and disorganized stores offend the boutique sensibilities of New Yorkers. “I just happened to be in a Duane Reade, and the entire time I contemplated how poorly planned the shops are,” says Karim Rashid, the industrial designer whose clients range from Acme supermarkets to Armani. “How bromide and miserable and vacuous the place is, how completely unaesthetic. What a poor experience.”
Yet over the past decade, Duane Reade has completed a voracious expansion campaign and achieved a ubiquity once limited to cabs and pigeons. How did a chain that’s neither the cheapest (a gallon of milk goes for $3.39 at Duane Reade and $3.19 at CVS) nor the nicest become New York shorthand for drugstore?
The company understands two important things: New Yorkers are uniquely harried shoppers, and the whole ball game comes down to real estate. Duane Reade has used its skill at that quintessential New York blood sport to cut rents by shoehorning its stores into bizarre locations other chains wouldn’t touch. And it’s kept New Yorkers coming back by knowing us better than we’d like to think: For all our bluster about good design, organic foods, and attentive service, we’ll take our Band-Aids and trash bags where we can get them. ...
Duane Reade also takes advantage of its intimate knowledge of New Yorkers to cram the stores with as much product as possible. [Duane Reade store designer Gary] Charboneau’s designs typically use four-foot-wide aisles instead of the five-foot highways in the ’burbs. “New York is one of the only places you’ll ever shop where people are tolerant of being bumped from behind,” he says, defying retailing guru Paco Underhill’s fatwa on “butt-brush.” The other thing we don’t seem worried about, according to Charboneau, is cleanliness: “New Yorkers are less sensitive to it.” ...
Carl
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