The most heartening piece of Buckhead retail news this season concerns a business moving only a few doors down. Wender & Roberts — founded on Peachtree Road in 1918 and a fixture of West Paces Ferry Shopping Center since 1962 — will exchange its longtime 5,000-square-foot storefront for a 1,750-square-foot space beside Starbucks at 1262 West Paces Ferry Road. The new quarters are expected to open in October, and the present counter will remain in continuous service until they are ready.
No one should pretend a smaller footprint comes without cost. The wandering gift aisles, a storefront unchanged for decades, and the wood-paneled office of former president Donald Wender —preserved through fifteen years of new ownership— will not all survive the transition, and longtime customers may be forgiven their sense of loss. By The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s account, owner Loren Pierce did not reach the decision lightly. But the unused office and storage space no longer earned its keep, and what a neighborhood pharmacy requires today — vaccination rooms, consultation space, a sharper health-and-wellness focus, with gifts and greeting cards still on offer — the new suite can accommodate.
This is, after all, no ordinary drugstore. James Dickey wrote it into “Looking for the Buckhead Boys,” his nostalgic 1969 poem. The soda fountain and lunch counter have long since vanished, but the house accounts — credit extended on trust and billed monthly — endure. “We still have house accounts from 50 years ago,” Pierce told the Journal-Constitution. No national chain could make such a claim.
The vacated space will be marketed, no doubt, as a rare Buckhead retail opportunity. That, however, is a leasing story. This is an institution story, about a 108-year-old business honest enough to measure what it truly needs and rooted enough to insist on needing it in the center where generations have filled their prescriptions.
“We’re staying right here,” Pierce said in the public statement announcing the move. In Buckhead, that plain declaration is the news. Institutions endure not by never changing, but by staying. When October arrives, this one still will be — somewhat smaller, and entirely itself.
