CAMP HILL, Pa. (WHTM) — When a CVS across the street closed permanently in August 2022, the Rite Aid at the corner of Market Street and Route 11/15 had chain pharmacy business at the busy intersection all to itself.

Apparently, that wasn’t enough.

abc27 visited the location Thursday evening after hearing word the location might be closing. Forget “might.” Forget “closing,” present tense.

The store was shuttered.

“SORRY WE ARE CLOSED,” read a sign in the window. There was no indication when it had closed or where customer prescriptions had been transferred.

A call to the store’s phone number was forwarded to a store in Lemoyne, where an employee confirmed prescriptions had been transferred. abc27 has contacted Rite Aid headquarters to ask whether customers had been notified of that.

A woman drove into the empty parking lot and looked confused. She said she was “very surprised” and didn’t recall Rite Aid posting any advance notice about the closure.

“CVS – I mean, they had it posted for a while, and we knew it was going to close. But this?” said the woman, Mary French. “No explanation.”

The closure follows recent reports of sudden store closures elsewhere by Rite Aid, which was formerly based in Camp Hill. It comes as analysts widely expect Rite Aid to file for bankruptcy.

What would that mean for the company’s stores, employees and customers?

Start with the good news: what it wouldn’t mean, according to Garrick Brown, the vice president of real estate intelligence for California-based Gallelli Real Estate.

“We definitely think this is just going to be a reorganization, that it’s not going to be bounced over to Chapter 7 and a complete liquidation with everything shutting down like Toys “R” Us has done in the past or Circuit City,” Brown said.

Still, Brown said, a filing would portend more store closures for a company that — like its larger rivals Walgreens and CVS — has already closed hundreds of stores in recent years.

How many?

“We’re thinking worst-case scenario could be 700 stores close,” Brown said. That would be nearly one out of every three stores, based on the company’s current footprint of 2,215 stores, according to a Gallelli report. Walgreens has 8,560 U.S. stores, according to the same data; CVS has 7,785.

But Brown said the total could be a more modest 300 or 400 stores, or about one out of every five or six Rite Aid stores.

Brown said Rite Aid’s biggest challenge is what it could have to pay as a result of opioid lawsuits. CVS and Walgreens are shelling out billions of dollars too, but they started off in a better place.

“The challenge for Rite Aid is that they’ve really never recovered from the financial woes they went through in the late 1990s,” when the company’s CEO, who was the founder’s son, went to prison after being accused of inflating the company’s reported earnings.

Brown said many of the spaces likely won’t remain vacant long, but they won’t be filled in most cases by Walgreens or CVS, which are in contraction mode too. More likely? Growing discount grocers like Aldi, Lidl or Grocery Outlet — or perhaps, in some cases, even Trader Joe’s — all of which tend to have store-sized more similar to chain pharmacy stores than to traditional supermarket chains.

Rite Aid didn’t immediately reply to an abc27 message asking about the Market Street store or speculation about the bankruptcy and future store closings.