“CANBERRA is a great environment and I think people have missed out in getting the offering that we have,” says Warren Turner who has been trying to get his Oze-Pharmacy store into the ACT for a while.

After a bit of a battle and some opposition, he’s just opened the first store in Belconnen.

“Canberra’s a natural progression for us. We just haven’t had the opportunity to get into Canberra. It’s been a very closed environment and it’s quite parochial in that we had quite a few objections to coming here. But we managed to overcome all that,” he says.

Warren, who is a pharmacist, joined with a colleague and opened the first Oze-Pharmacy store in Castle Hill in 2000. The two pharmacists had one shop assistant then. There are now 10 stores in NSW and more than 300 staff working for the discount pharmacy group.

“We’re not a big, massive corporate business, but we have sound principles to deliver what we say we’re going to do,” Warren says.

“We’re serious about what we’re doing in terms of healthcare… customer service is not about putting a product in a paper bag, it’s about knowledge of your product, communicating with people to get a product that best fits their needs, and it’s also about believing in the products you sell.”

Warren believes that Oze-Pharmacy has everything a customer can get from a smaller, locally owned chemist and more.

“We have over 10,000 lines in our stores so we probably have more choice than any of the smaller pharmacies do,” he says.

“We have personable staff that have trained in communication and we invest heavily in how we go about managing our stores.”

And like other discount pharmacies, they offer discounts on prescriptions.

“When we started in 2000, there were very few pharmacies offering discounted prescriptions,” he says.

So how do they manage to keep the prices down? Warren says, they buy in bulk and pass the savings on, they keep operational costs to a minimum and they save on rent by staying out of big shopping centres.

“It’s still a traditional pharmacy feel, just on a bigger scale,” he says.

Oze-Pharmacy is in Chandler street Belconnen ozepharmacy.com.au