Meet New Owner of ‘The Medicine Shoppe’-Sagar Thumar

Meet New Owner of ‘The Medicine Shoppe’-Sagar Thumar

Rosanne Fortier News Correspondent

The former owner of ‘The Medicine Shoppe, Peggy Lobay chose to work for this pharmacy instead of owning it and the Town of Vegreville and staff of ‘The Medicine Shoppe is pleased to welcome the new owner, Sagar Thumar. Sagar bought this store in April, 2019.

He used to have a pharmacy in Canmore and he still lives in Canmore but he plans to move to Vegreville in the fall of 2019 because he really likes Vegreville as he says everyone is friendly in this town. It is a small community and he has lived in small communities before which he admitted he really enjoys being part of.

Sagar said he is a recent pharmacist graduate and he has been practising for four years now. The special benefits this store gives their customers are they have a lot of extended services which include they give a lot of injections, assessments; travel consultants which include what vaccinations people need when they travel out of the country and people can get strep throat tests on site. “We are bringing a lot more services like INR (blood thinner) testing on site. This is not available at all pharmacies. We offer advanced pharmacy and we are trying to keep all our services up-todate in the way that you can find in any pharmacy across Canada,” Sagar explained. ‘

The Medicine Shoppe’ is involved in the community and it continues to want to do this as they have done and will do a lot of sponsorship. “Recently, we had a representative from the Vegreville Pysanka Festival come in who wanted sponsorship and we supported this event. As well, we plan to sponsor the upcoming parade. We already had someone from Vegreville Agricultural Society come in and we were willing to sponsor this organization and the events they hold,” Sagar said. “Also, we focus on a lot of health promotions which you will find if you go on our Facebook page. There is a health informative feature which gets people really involved in awareness and how to prevent certain health issues from happening. Yesterday, we had information on how to prevent high blood pressure; there is something in your food which can increase your blood pressure by 30%.”

In the future, Sagar said they will be upgrading the building the store is in. They will make it more accessible and more spacious where they will add a couple more rooms so they can offer a few more services. They have already extended their hours and are open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. now and they plan to be open on the weekends in the fall. “We want to offer everything the big stores have. We are small but we stand out in services. Unlike some other drug stores, we are people oriented and totally pharmacy focused. As well, some of the stock we carry is lower priced than other pharmacies.” Sagar added.