It’s not about slow business, druggist Randell Sullivan said concerning a recent decision to consolidate his Van Voris Street Sullivan’s Drug Store with his Mettesave Store located on Highway 6 East.

But that doesn’t make it easy. Sullivan began working in the store in 1956 when it was Burnley’s Drug Store. When there was no pharmacist to continue to fill prescriptions, he got special permission from the state board as a pharmacy student to keep the prescriptions filled.

In 1957 he purchased the store and recalls that a recent day’s deposit was one-third of that entire year’s total deposits.

The store and the Sullivans have done well, opening, selling or buying other stores including Mettesave in 1995 — he’s kind of a horse trader.

“I’m no spring chicken myself,” Sullivan says while noting that he never used an adding machine until recent years. An exit strategy involving his pharmacist son, Randy, who lost his life to cancer in 2002, made need for strategy B. 

Randy’s widow, Amy Phillips, who is also a pharmacist, continues to assist by traveling to Batesville from the Nashville area to work scheduled shifts and give other pharmacists, daughter Susan and Mettasave pharmacist Erik Broome, relief.

Sullivan recalls that he had a large volume of out-of-town business, some that included large farmers who paid yearly. And there is a thick ledger card file that holds several “books” of unpaid accounts from those unable to pay due to death or personal economy.

He has seen Batesville grow from the Square (he has always maintained Van Voris businesses were never treated as well as those on the Downtown Square) to Highway 6, 51 now I-55.

Family, age, and health may be factors in the consolidation but a new and expensive computer system to satisfy a pharmaceutical supplier’s requirements gave the knowledgeable businessman the necessary nudge needed to make a move in haste to avoid replacing two systems rather than one. 

Remembering that he just recently advanced to an adding machine tells that he has been handling peripheral duties rather than filling a lot of prescriptions.

And although he has passed the normal age of retirement, he and his wife, Nan, make daily trips to the stores taking care of the business that allows other workers to make the business flow.

Downtown has lost a good resident.

Let’s hope some young ambitious business people come in and take up the slack.