Walgreens is coming to Morro Bay. The pharmacy giant erected signs on the front of the former Rite Aid store on Quintana Road last week, announcing its intentions to open here. Photo by Neil Farrell
Morro Bay will be getting another pharmacy chain store, after Rite Aid closed last year and left a huge hole in the local drug store market.
Walgreens, a major pharmacy chain with thousands of stores across the U.S. is preparing to move into the former Rite Aid space at 740 Quintana Rd.
The rumor mill has been working overtime for quite a while, but the company hadn’t announced anything until last week. That’s when Walgreen’s erected two temporary signs on the front façade announcing that Walgreens would be opening soon.
Estero Bay News stuck a nose into the opened front doors and asked a workman inside if he knew of any target date for opening the store? He said he didn’t and that work on the store was behind schedule.
Rite Aid left the store shelving in place when they shut down and Walgreens appears to have removed some of the shelving, apparently to make room for its own displays.
One local online news source reported on Walgreens’ plans.
Cal Coast News reported that Walgreens was advertising job openings in Morro Bay, including a store manager, pharmacy manager, cashiers, and customer service associates, among others.
Estero Bay News sought to confirm this report with Walgreens but emails to their media office went unanswered.
EBN also contacted the property management company seeking confirmation, but they were no help either.
Last week’s new signage would appear to end the speculation. The signs also list a website for anyone interested in getting a job, see: Walgreens.com/Careers.
On the Walgreens website, EBN found one remaining job listing in Morro Bay for Customer Service Associates, a job that pays from $16.90 to $19 an hour (see: https://jobs.walgreens.com/en/job/morro-bay/customer-service-associate/1242/93214007792 if interested).
It’s an old company and well-recognized brand. Walgreens was founded in 1901, some 125-years ago, by Charles R. Walgreen, Sr., who purchased the pharmacy where he worked on the South Side of Chicago.
Over the ensuing decades Walgreens has changed the meaning of pharmacy, introducing the world to the malted milkshake and childproof prescription caps, among numerous other innovations.
Today there are 8,000 Walgreens locations across all 50 States and Puerto Rico. The nearest one to us here in the Estero Bay Area is on El Camino Real in Atascadero.
When Walgreens opens in Morro Bay, it will fill the large retail space that had housed Rite Aid since the Cypress Plaza Shopping Center was built in the later 1990s. It will also fill the spot that Rite Aid held as one of the City’s biggest sources of sales tax revenues and a major private employer in town.
Rite Aid had been in business for some 60 years but filed for bankruptcy last year and over 2,000 stores closed last summer at roughly the same time including two in San Luis Obispo, and one each in Los Osos and Morro Bay.
Rite Aid still had some 56 stores still open but by October 2025, those too were closed.
Though Rite Aid left a big hole, Estero Bay communities were not left entirely without pharmacies.
Los Osos still has two — one inside the Ralph’s Supermarket, and the independently owned Rexall.
Morro Bay saw the opening of a small, takeout drug store, the Pill Shop in North Morro Bay. In Cayucos, the Cayucos Pharmacy remains open. But the lack of a large retail pharmacy was definitely felt by the community.
But Rite Aid may not be totally dead. There is something calling itself “The New Rite Aid Team.”
On a website entitled, “Riteaid.com/what-happened,” it reads, “People who filled the same prescription at the same counter for twenty years had to figure out somewhere else to go.
“Employees who had given a decade or more of their careers to Rite Aid found out those careers were over. Not because of anything they did. Because the business failed around them.”
It should be noted that CVS Pharmacy bought out most of the prescriptions from Rite Aid when it closed, but customers had the choice to move their scripts wherever they wanted to go.
EBN sent an email to Walgreens’ media people via the website, seeking a target opening date but did not hear back before deadline.
