BRATTLEBORO — Eye all of the images, postcards and information clippings that paper Mary Giamartino’s workplace, and also you’ll see how the Lodge Pharmacy opened at downtown’s Brooks Home in 1940, then stored its title when it moved to the previous hearth station in 1978 and to the previous Methodist church in 1993.

However simply previous the shop cabinets lit by century-and-a-half-old stained-glass home windows is a stack of payments that illuminates a fair larger distinction.

Take the prescription for the ache reliever hydromorphone. The pharmacy purchased it for a affected person at $189.12. But, after the client’s $10 copay, insurance coverage reimbursed solely one other $15.21.

“I misplaced $163.91,” Giamartino mentioned. “However do you not fill it? No, this girl was dying.”

And so, because of this, is the native impartial drugstore — a capturing star exterior a bigger galaxy of company insurers, big-box pharmacies and generic producers.

“Loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss …” Giamartino mentioned as she ran her finger down document after document calculating what’s charged versus what’s collected. “It simply stored getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. Like past worse.”

That’s why the Brattleboro mom-and-pop will shut for good Tuesday after 83 years, dispersing prospects to one of many city’s 4 chain drugstores whereas dropping the variety of Vermont independents from upward of fifty a decade in the past to 16 at this time.

“Insurance coverage firm reimbursements to us are so low, we are able to’t make any cash,” Giamartino mentioned. “It simply obtained to the purpose the place there was nothing else I might do.”

The 67-year-old didn’t envision her present predicament when she and her fellow pharmacist husband, Frank, purchased the enterprise in 1982. Working extra collaboratively than competitively, the pharmacy was one among three downtown seemingly based by Mr. Gower within the movie “It’s a Fantastic Life.”

Transferring to the previous Methodist church, the metropolitan New York household hung Mets baseball banners underneath the vaulted ceiling, rock-riffing stereo audio system the place the choir as soon as sang, and snapshots all over the place else of sons Vincent and Nicholas — the latter pictured on a college bus alongside classmate (and present state treasurer) Mike Pieciak.

Then got here tragedy. In 2001, Nicholas died in his sleep from an an infection at age 17. 5 years later, in 2006, Frank was killed in a automobile crash at age 53.

“The one advantage of this,” the spouse and mom instructed the native paper upon her husband’s demise, “is that every single day he received’t must get up and say, ‘I really like you, Nick. I miss you.’”

Giamartino has run the enterprise ever since, heading a staff of 20 staff who supply 24-hour emergency service, native supply and the power to compound medicine in-house.

“They exit of their solution to help the clientele,” mentioned Karen Peterson, outgoing government director of the AIDS Undertaking of Southern Vermont. “It doesn’t matter who you might be or what your standing is locally. You’re feeling cared for there. You’re a person, not a quantity.”

Lodge Pharmacy has stood alone after the closure of Brattleboro’s three different mom-and-pop drugstores. Statewide, it has seen counterparts just lately shuttered or offered to bigger outfits in Bennington and Manchester; Bristol, Middlebury and Vergennes; Rutland; and Woodstock.

Unbiased drugstores hope a brand new Vermont regulation boosting state regulation of pharmacy profit administration will begin to stem the losses.

“Pharmacies aren’t answerable for their financials — we don’t management the price of the medicines, nor can we management the reimbursement,” mentioned Jeff Hochberg, president of the Vermont Retail Druggists Affiliation. “Each state within the nation is feeling this, rural ones particularly. I believe that pharmacy is a superb bellwether for true reform of the well being care system.”

The Vermont Division of Monetary Regulation is about to launch a report on the difficulty this month. However it’s too little too late for Lodge Pharmacy, which has waded too a few years in crimson ink.

Giamartino tried to chop prices by dropping promoting, then donations to group causes, then employees raises and bonuses. This previous yr she regarded for somebody to purchase the enterprise.

Nobody made a proposal.

“A good friend mentioned, ‘Mary, it’s going to interrupt your coronary heart. Prepare.’ And I mentioned, ‘I guess all the pieces I’ve that it received’t.’ I used to be unsuitable.”

And so Giamartino reached out to Brattleboro’s two chains, Ceremony Support and Walgreens, earlier than deciding to cross on her buyer information to the latter upon the shut of enterprise Tuesday.

Nobody is pleased with the ending, as seen on social media or heard via discuss city.

“We made certain our sufferers could be OK,” mentioned Jodi Harrison, a pharmacy technician for 3 a long time. “Now we’re undecided who’s going to verify.”

Giamartino is about to promote the constructing, however not earlier than gathering the images, postcards and clippings that maintain so many recollections.

“I’m going to recollect working with an exquisite group of people who gave the very best pharmacy care that anyone might,” she mentioned. “There’s nothing like serving to someone, making them really feel higher, letting them die the way in which they need to die.”

Even when, as she understands firsthand, they in the end don’t need to.