Judy Sansone

The news out of Rhode Island that Judy Sansone, chief merchant at CVS Pharmacy, will shortly retire signals more than the end of a remarkable and productive retail career. It marks the end of the way chain drug stores have done business since they eclipsed independent pharmacies as the outlet of choice among drug store customers.

Put a date on that event if you wish — the decade of the 1960s comes to mind — but more than a moment in time, the emergence of chain drug stores in America signaled the dawn of the era of mass merchant ­retailing.

Their names and the miracles they produced — Vern Brunner, Jim Mastrian, Chris Bodine, Paul Stanton, Doug Degn — speak to a way of doing business that no longer exists. It was a time of item merchants, a time when a stunning new product could, and often did, reverse the fortunes of a mass retailer and the merchant who ran the company that sold it. It was an era when semiannual excursions by retailers to “the Orient” routinely produced new discoveries, new directions and new ways of doing business.

The intent here is not to put Sansone on a pedestal. With a team of dedicated, disciplined, savvy and knowledgeable merchants she has completed the task initially directed by Tom Ryan and implemented by Bodine: She has transformed CVS into America’s corner drug store.

While doing so, Sansone might inadvertently have signed the drug store’s death notice. CVS today remains, along with Walgreens, Rite Aid, Walmart, Target and a rapidly diversifying grocery industry, the store shoppers frequent for the health and beauty aids that fill America’s medicine cabinets and the general merchandise that overrun homes.

But mass retailers are no longer the country’s item merchants. Today, their primary function is to keep America healthy or, failing that, to restore health to a national community for which good health has become a national obsession. Along the way, drug chains like CVS have recast themselves not only as health providers but as entities involved in how Americans foot the health care bill. CVS’ bold initiative in acquiring one of America’s insurance pillars is ample testament to that direction. The drug chain intends to become America’s partner in protecting, preserving and restoring, when necessary, people’s health.

Change is in the nature of American retailing. It has kept the country young, vibrant, exciting. It has kept America’s cash registers clicking even as new retailers have replaced the old, and yesterday’s icons have become today’s casualties or, sadder still, today’s memories.

As news spread of Sansone’s impending retirement, the chain drug industry responded in a way and to a degree not seen perhaps since Walgreens’ Brunner stopped taking his annual or semiannual trips to Asia and returning with new ideas, new products and, often, new life for the Walgreen Co.

As Abraham Lincoln once memorably said: “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.” Lincoln, for one of the very few times in his life, was wrong. No one has forgotten what he said at Gettysburg. And some considerable time will pass before members of the chain drug community will forget what Sansone achieved, and what CVS accomplished on her watch.

Industry people reacted to Sansone’s announcement not out of some misplaced feelings of admiration for the individual. They reacted out of respect for her accomplishments, out of the regard they had come to feel for the job she has done, the strides CVS took under her direction, the emergence of CVS into national prominence.

Even neutral observers, those industry people who have not directly benefited from her wise leadership, have come to admire the individual and the way she has grown into the job. Simply put, the Sansone who will shortly leave CVS is not the same individual who joined the company as a new employee 42 years ago. No. She retires as a pillar of a community of merchants, a merchant who has kept alive the industry’s hard-earned reputation for its ability and success in selling items to American consumers and, along the way, selling the chain drug industry as the place to shop when the object has been to find, buy, enjoy and cherish the next compelling item.

Judy Sansone will be missed in ways not yet calculated, and CVS Pharmacy, whatever directions the drug chain now charts, will miss her in yet-to-be-predicted ways.