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About the author: Lawrence W. Abrams I have a B.A. in Economics from Amherst College and a Ph.D. in Economics from Washington University in St. Louis. Emails welcome: labrams@gmail.com ​ In 2002, I started looking at the 10-Qs and 10-Ks of the drug store chains and pharmacy benefit managers after an "aha moment" in a Mountain View CA. Longs Drug store (later bought out by CVS). I had gone there to to pick-up my renewal Rx of Type 2 diabetes drug Glucophage. Several things happened that night piqued my interest in PBMs and big drug store chains. First, I found out my Rx for Glucophage was now an Rx for Metformin without my prior knowledge. I asked the pharmacist what was going on. He mentioned that my Rx now had a cheaper generic available and my drug benefit plan manager made the switch automatically. That night I was also struck by the fact that here was a 12,000 square feet store and all the customers were lined up at the pharmacy counter in the back. I asked myself, "Could it be that hole in the wall in the back generated all the profits while the front store was just a relic of the bygone days of lunch counters and shopping on Main Street? The question of relative source of pre-tax profits -- pharmacy vs front store -- piqued my interest all the more as I compared the pathetic merchandising I saw in this big drug store chain versus the amazing health product merchandising I saw a week earlier at the first Whole Foods store on the West Coast in downtown Palo Alto, CA. Based on that "aha moment", I wrote the following three papers in 2002 and 2003 and created an early Wordpress website and made them accessible via .pdfs for free: Nu-Retail: A Counter to the Web- 2002 The Next Tom's of Maine - 2002 Walgreen's Transparency Issue - November 2003 In addition, I was an early adopter of PBM as acronym for pharmacy benefit managers and I published the first publicly available papers to quantify the PBM business model and retained rebates: ​ Quantifying Medco's Business Model - April 2005 Estimating the Rebate-Retention Rate of Pharmacy Benefit Managers - April 2003