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Barr’s Pharmacy to close after nearly a century at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront

Staff mug of Stacy Parker. As seen Thursday, March 2, 2023.
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Barr’s Pharmacy — an independent, family-owned business that has stood in the resort area for nearly a century — will shutter its doors next week.

The store’s last day will be Aug. 12.

“It was not an easy decision, and it’s taken me four years to come to it,” said owner Carol Hall, 63, whose husband, Rick, died in 2016.

A veteran pharmacist, Rick Hall had been the heart of the business — often greeting customers by name.

“Everyone missed my husband,” she said. “It’s not the same when someone like that is gone.”

Hall said Rick’s death combined with the financial challenges of increased prescription costs, decreased insurance reimbursements and incentives for mail order prescriptions made it too difficult for her to hold on to the store.

“There’s just no way to make it economically,” she said.

Barr’s Pharmacy was built in the 1920s on the south corner of 17th Street and Atlantic Avenue, which was at that time the busy commercial center of Virginia Beach.

It originally was owned by a man with the last name Barr. Sam Mason took it over in the 1960s or ’70s and was known for hiring teenagers who lived at the Oceanfront.

Rick Hall landed a job at Barr’s when he was 13, sorting the pages of the newspaper. Mason was his mentor, leading him to eventually become a pharmacist and buy the store.

“It was the only job he ever held in his entire life,” Carol Hall said.

She met Rick when she was 16 and working at Barr’s soda fountain.

“There were a lot of regulars that would come in and have their coffee and read the paper,” Carol recalled.

Barr’s was a bit of everything: souvenir shop, bookstore and post office. Tourists shopped for beach towels and T-shirts while locals browsed magazines waiting for their prescription to be filled.

“It was like a one-stop shop,” Carol said.

For those who grew up at the beach, Barr’s Pharmacy was more than just the place their mom relied on for cures. It was a hangout for many teenagers who cooled off with a limeade or stood in line for concert tickets.

Hall’s sons, Nick and Jeff, became pharmacists, too. Jeff will be working at Barr’s until it closes.

Former employees and customers reminisced about the Virginia Beach fixture on Facebook this week.

Thomas Goode posted that he worked two summers in the 1970s at Barr’s as a stock boy and delivery driver. He drove the “Pill Wagon,” an old Ranchero with no power steering or air conditioning.

Laurel Holmes bought teen magazines and her first tube of lipstick at Barr’s. “So sad to see it go,” she wrote.

Customers have been advised to move their prescriptions to the chain pharmacy around the corner. Hall plans to lease the Barr’s building with its iconic blue tile wall to a new tenant.

She’s knows there’s a lot of nostalgia tied up in the place. A customer recently told her Barr’s closing is “like losing an old friend,” Hall said. “There are a lot of memories, but times change and things go away.”

Stacy Parker, 757-222-5125, stacy.parker@pilotonline.com