This issue of Chain Drug Review includes — indeed highlights — our editors’ choices for the most outstanding retailers of the year that ended last month. We at CDR do not take these awards lightly. Nor do we give our selections a cursory review before moving on to other subjects and future issues of the publication.

Rather, these annual selections are our most important annual project. To be selected by our editors as the best at what they do is, we believe, the highest form of recognition we can bestow on those companies we research, write about and, indeed, live with through the year. We like to believe we are as familiar with the workings of these retailers as any outsider could possibly be. Not only do we have ongoing working relationships with these retailers, we also like to believe that our editors have close personal relationships with the retailers we write about, relationships grounded in the respect and admiration we have come to feel for them over the years and decades.

So it is that, this year, we have recognized five individuals and/or retail companies which, in our opinion, have performed at a level their competitors can only admire — and try to ­emulate.

Our choice as Chain Drug Retailer of the Year is a retailer that, owing in part to its Canadian location, is sometimes overlooked by its U.S. rivals. That retailer is Shoppers Drug Mart, a consistently brilliant performer that is invariably at the top of chain drug performance charts. Shoppers’ senior executives may come and go in the natural evolution of senior managers. But the Shoppers brand, one that has always represented both excellence and a stubborn refusal to be satisfied with the status quo, is our choice as Chain Drug Retailer of the Year.

Equally significant, in our collective option, is our selection of Judy Sansone, the recently retired chief merchant at CVS, for a Lifetime Achievement award. As is the case with Shoppers, it is sometimes too easy to overlook Judy’s consistently excellent performance and unfailingly outstanding results. CVS, as one of the two outstanding U.S. drug chains, is always growing, always changing, always improving, always striving to reach the next wrung on the retailing ladder. But through it all, the good times and the bad, the heights of spectacular accomplishment and occasional disappointments of targets missed and opportunities ignored, Judy has always been there, the ideal representative of a chain drug community highlighted and exemplified by the character and ability of its senior managers. And Judy Sansone has consistently been among the best of those managers, more capable last year than she was the year before, more productive today than she was yesterday.

This year, the editors of CDR named a store of the year. In reality, it was an easy decision, as much for the retailer that earned this award as for the store that retailer fielded in a crowded and often confusing health care arena where accessible, affordable health care is too often the exception, not frequently enough the rule. Thus, our store of the year is Walmart’s just opened Walmart Health unit in Dallas, Ga., the Atlanta suburb that is sometimes confused with Dallas, Texas. Describing this facility does not, and cannot, do it justice. It represents what health care should be, must be, occasionally strives to be in a nation that does not often strive with enough energy, enough purpose, enough commitment and enough determination. Once more, Walmart has raised the bar, this time in an environment more likely suited to a chain drug store initiative along these lines.

Our editors have cited Walgreens for its ongoing ability to innovate, to break new ground, to try new directions, to take new steps. Last year, Walgreens took that initiative to new levels of commitment and challenge, most notably — but by no means exclusively — by teaming with Kroger, one of America’s premier grocery retailers, to offer the customers of each retailer some options neither one could offer alone. How many chain drug retailers would, after all, reach out to a competitor to help that retailer simplify the shopping experience? The answer: Too few. One exception: Walgreens.

Finally, we have recognized a regional drug chain as the best of that group. The recognition goes to Lewis Drug of South Dakota. Here again, we’re citing a retailer whose performance, whose aspirations, whose level of excellence typically raises the bar for every drug chain in America. But more than recognizing a drug chain’s performance, we are noting the performance of an individual, one whose excellence has come to be recognized as standard. That individual is Mark Griffin, Lewis’ CEO and guiding force. Griffin was, is and apparently will always be the type of leader who typifies chain drug retailing in America.

Put another, and perhaps better, way, to those who know Mark Griffin no explanation is necessary; to those who do not, no explanation is possible.