Cheap Pharmacies in Sydney
Long long time ago when I was young, single and living at home with my parents, going to “pharmacy” was an idea never ever occurred to me, especially when my dad was a doctor, and we always “magically” have the right medications ready at home. Now fast forward a bit. I am no longer young, married — and with a very young child — and live far far away from my doctor dad… Suddenly (well, maybe not that sudden) we need to frequently visit the pharmacies to keep the sickness away.
Vivian my wife has kept a list of on-line pharmacies that she often visited. First of all, unless urgent, your local pharmacy shop is usually much more expensive than the ones you can buy from on-line. Well, sometimes you just can’t wait and you need that cough medicine now. In that case, do whatever is the easiest — and that’s what we did when Anna was coughing badly and we ended up getting the coughing syrup from a pharmacy on Anzac Parade. We then went to one of the online pharmacies to get more, ended up getting twice the amount of the same brand for less than we had paid the local store…
And online only means they have online presence. There are a lot of online pharmacies in Australia, but we only want the ones that are (1) cheap (that’s obvious), but also (2) local, so we can pick up or our friends who do the pick up for us, to save postage (useful when you buy something like 5litre bath oil). We also feel safer with the pharmacy stores with a shop-front/warehouse presence.
Another thing is, some of them are actually willing to do price match for you. So you might have a preferred shop which is close to you, but not always have the best price. Ask them and give them a link to the same product on another website to see whether they can match the price for you.
Okie. These are the ones we use
Epharmacy — they have shops all over Australia, and I heard that a new one is opening in Maroubra.
Pharmacy Direct — we found them quite often the cheapest. A bit far away from us (Eastern suburbs) as they are in Silverwaters.
Pharmacy Online — this is probably the one we shopped most often. They are in Bondi and often do price matching for us.
I would like to know if you know other good pharmacies in Sydney/Australia that has very good price. Another thing I would like to look into is a staticICE-like price comparison for pharmaceutical products, so people can search for price from one spot. It should be straight forward as there ain’t that many sites to scrap (comparing to staticICE that is). Maybe when I have time :)
This might sound like the bleedin’ obvious Scott, but many, many people need far more from pharmacies than just cheap cough syrup.
Those of us who have to cope with chronic illness are as dependant on our pharmacist as we are our doctor(s), so please don’t reduce the issue of ‘pharmacies’ to one of ‘cheapest is best’, because for a huge number of people it just ain’t so!
I am SO grateful that the government banned the supermarkets from setting up pharmacies in ‘competition’ with the smaller, local shop fronts.
Neil,
Sure. I am mainly talking about the pharmaceutical products that you buy that don’t need doctors or pharmacists, especially those you can buy in bulk.
We have just tried to order some QV Cream as we used them a lot (both wife and daughter have dry skins). And being able to source the cheap ones online, instead of buying from local pharmacy store, saved us a lot over the years…
Great idea, the price search engine for pharmacies. I would do it tomorrow if I had the programming skills.
I agree that pharmaceutical products are often sold with outrageous markups when you compare shopfront prices with the pricing you can get online. Yes, I realise that pharmacists can provide useful advice, and their wages have to be paid, but the markups are ridiculous! For example I use Cetaphil ph-neutral skin wash and a 1L bottle costs about $16 online, or $32 in a pharmacy.
Also, prescription medications can be a cash-drain. The PBS price for one drug I have to buy every month is about $30. The most common generic brand is about $28.50. However, one of the online stores (Pharmacy Direct) sells a version under the GenRx brand for $16.00. That’s a substantial saving!
Plus, legitimate online pharmacies in Australia are still required by law to provide all the care that a shopfront does. Pharmacy Direct in particular has a very good ‘guestbook’ section where they give Q&A advice to customers.
It’s interesting that Pharmacy Direct was bought by Coles Myer for $48.5million recently… they obviously see great potential in the business model. I just hope Coles Myer doesn’t push the prices up.