Stuart Wheeler, who has managed Wheeler's Pharmacy for some 28 years, chats with customer Mike Warner, who said he'd been coming to Wheeler's since 1963, when he first discovered the milkshakes. / Photo by Reggie Beehner
William “Buddy” Wheeler opened Wheeler Pharmacy in Lexington’s Chevy Chase neighborhood in January 1958, when he was a twenty-three-year-old with a newly minted degree from the University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy. His was one of the first businesses established on Romany Road and, in fact, people asked him at the time why he decided to build a drug store “so far out of town.”
Six decades later, business is still going strong and Wheeler, who recently turned 84, still pops in to the pharmacy for a few hours almost daily. “They call me the Vice President of Special Tasks now,” Wheeler said, referring to his kids, who have taken over the business’s day-to-day operations.
Family-run in the most literal sense, Wheeler’s four children—with his wife of nearly 64 years, Lucy—all have their designated role in the business. Oldest son Kendall Wheeler, who retired from IBM, helps with project management and IT. Son Stuart Wheeler is the store and fountain manager. Daughter Margaret Meredith is a CPA who handles the accounting. And his youngest daughter, Claire Wheeler Love, a pharmacist, manages the pharmacy operation and also owns and runs her own business, Wheeler’s Custom Compounding, across the street. Kendall’s wife Tammy is the pharmacy’s bookkeeper, and all nine of Wheeler’s grandchildren have worked in the store at one time or another.
“Having defined roles is why it works,” Stuart Wheeler said.
Love agreed. “I wouldn’t say we’ve never stepped on each other’s toes—that’s going to happen from time to time—but at the end of the day we know that, while this is business, we’re family first.”
Always Innovating
Over the years, Wheeler Pharmacy has had its share of notoriety. Its fountain—where you can order a hot breakfast or lunch Monday through Saturday—is practically hallowed ground for Big Blue Nation, thanks to its status as a favorite hangout of UK coaches, especially longtime regular Joe B. Hall. ESPN even filmed Coach Cal having breakfast there in 2012.
As fun as that’s been, the family said the best part of their job has been the chance to connect in a real, tangible way to the community they serve. “One of our customers said once that ‘Wheeler’s is like Cheers without the beers,’ ” Stuart Wheeler said. “Everybody knows everybody here.”
Still, there’s more to Wheeler’s longevity than its status as a friendly place to grab some Tylenol or a bite to eat. The business has been able to weather six decades of ups and downs thanks largely to Buddy Wheeler’s ingenuity and entrepreneurial savvy, his kids said.
1 of 5
Haley Poston helped fill prescriptions at Wheeler's Pharmacy. Poston, 24, a student from London, Kentucky, at the University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy, was nearing the end of her six-week internship at the pharmacy. / Photo by Reggie Beehner
2 of 5
Lynne Eckmann (left), who directs Wheeler's Pharmacy's home delivery service, dubbed Home Connection, prepared prescription boxes for clients. Assisting is Nahed Qasem, a pharmacy technician. / Photo by Reggie Beehner
3 of 5
The counter at Wheeler's Pharmacy is famed for its reputation as a place where locals go to eat a hearty breakfast, have some coffee and talk about the Wildcats and perhaps a little politics. / Photo by Reggie Beehner
4 of 5
Lee Tolliver, who has worked as a cook and waitress at Wheeler's Pharmacy for more than 20 years, delivered a recent breakfast order to customers at the counter. / Photo by Reggie Beehner
5 of 5
Ricky Camp (right), a cook at Wheeler's Pharmacy for 14 years, shared a laugh with his longtime colleague Shakara Hardin, who's worked at the store for nine years. / Photo by Reggie Beehner
“Dad has always been progressive in the ways that he does things,” Love said, noting that Wheeler’s was one of the first pharmacies in the area to adopt an integrated computer system for prescriptions in the 1980s and then, later, to develop and utilize a computerized point-of-sale system in the early 1990s. “He’s had a central inventory set up forever—where, if you fall below 30 tablets, the system automatically reorders—but I remember when I was working at a big-box pharmacy in 1999, we were still having to go through the shelves, shaking bottles to see what we were low on,” Love said. “And Wheeler’s has had automated [pill] counting machines since the early 2000s, but in many chain pharmacies, they’re still counting pills on trays even now.”
“I am just always thinking ahead, trying to see what’s coming down the road,” Buddy Wheeler said about his willingness to evolve to best meet his customers’ needs.
It was that mentality that led him to add a compounding pharmacy—which Love now runs as a separate entity—to the family’s business model in the late 1990s and, in the mid-2000s, to establish a medication management program called Wheeler’s Home Connection, which provides individualized medication counseling and prescription home delivery for enrollees, most of them home-bound seniors. More recently, the pharmacy responded to the loss of the nearby Romany Road Kroger by adding a refrigerator for milk and other perishables and expanding its grocery inventory to help provide needed staples for area residents.“You might think that the bigger pharmacy companies would be the ones that have the most technology integrated into their systems,” Love said. “But Dad found that, as a solo entrepreneur all those years, no one was holding him back. There wasn’t corporate red tape to deal with. And if he wanted to make a change, he just did it.”
Wheeler’s Custom Compounding
Wheeler’s Custom Compounding is in the final stages of an expansion that’s more than doubling its size, just across Romany Road from the original Wheeler Pharmacy. When the renovation is complete, the compounding pharmacy will include two dedicated labs for preparing personalized medications for clients. The store also offers a full line of health products available to walk-in customers, including pharmaceutical-grade vitamins and supplements, hemp and CBD oil products, essential oils, skin care and veterinary products—such as DappleUp, an all-natural dog and horse shampoo developed by Stuart’s daughter, Katherine Wheeler. There are also plans to launch a series of educational health workshops for the public.
Claire Wheeler Love owns and manages Wheeler’s Custom Compounding, where custom medicines are made. Love also helps oversee the pharmacy at Wheeler's. / Photo by Reggie Beehner
As a compounding pharmacist, Love—who was named Kentucky’s pharmacist of the year in 2015—feels she gets to more actively partner with health care providers to fine-tune patient dosages, suggest alternative therapies and assist patients who may have allergies or intolerance to dyes or chemicals found in mass-produced medications. Love and her eight-member staff are also able to offer specialized services not possible at a traditional pharmacy, including hormone replacement therapy and custom prescriptions for both human and veterinary clients. “Medicine isn’t one size fits all,” she said. “The more I worked with Dad and learned about compounding, the more I realized it was my true calling.”
“The more I worked with Dad and learned about compounding, the more I realized it was my true calling.” —Claire Love
While the compounding pharmacy is its own business entity, owned wholly by Love since 2012, the two pharmacies work in tandem to make their services as convenient as possible for patients. “Our computer systems are networked, and if a client has prescriptions at both locations, we deliver to one or the other so they don’t have to make two stops,” she said.
But, despite their proximity, the two businesses’ client bases don’t widely overlap. Wheeler Pharmacy prescription clients are mainly nearby Chevy Chase residents, whereas clients at the compounding pharmacy come from across the state and beyond.
“At Custom Compounding, we are offering a specialized service, so it’s typically a different clientele that seeks us out. We do a lot of shipping,” Love said.
In an era where profit margins on sales of prescriptions continue to be tightened from caps set by insurance companies and other third-party payers, Love and Stuart Wheeler said it’s their father’s prescient business diversification that has kept them profitable all these years. “He understood that you have to offer other services—beyond simply filling prescriptions—if you’re going to make it,” Love said.