Rite Aid closes another Philly store, this time on Walnut Street. It’s the seventh one in a year.

Home-health aide Tracey Collins walked to the Rite Aid the other day on the 2300 block of Walnut Street for incontinence supplies and medications for a 91-year-old client in a nearby senior home.

“I am going to miss the staff,” she said, when the store closes Thursday for good.

Collins, 35, said she expected to switch to the Rite Aid at 1900 Arch St., near the Comcast towers and also within walking distance of the senior home, though “it won’t be as easy.”

She then learned it closed, too — in May.

Rite Aid, facing financial losses and a declining stock price, has shuttered seven stores in Philadelphia in the last year, most of them in Center City, in an industrywide consolidation. Between them, Rite Aid and CVS have announced more than 1,000 store closings over three years, driven by prior overbuilding, drugstore chain economics, and the popularity of mail-order prescriptions.

Officials for the union representing store workers say expiring leases and crime also seem to be factors in Philadelphia.

Mahmud Hassan, professor at the Rutgers University Business School and a drugstore expert, warns: “There are too many pharmacies in the country.”

“Rite Aids are facing stiff competition from Walgreens, CVS, Amazon and Walmart and the mail-order services,” Hassan said. “They are not selling enough. They have low revenues and a high-cost structure.”

Rite Aid, which operates 2,400 stores in 17 states, projected that it would close 145 stores between last fall and this summer.

The company says 70% of its sales come from prescription drugs, 11% from over-the-counter medications, 4.5% from health and beauty aids, and 14.5% from general merchandise. The revenues in its latest full year were $24.6 billion, and it lost $81 million.

CVS separately announced in November a plan to close about 300 stores a year for three years, nearly a tenth of its 10,000 or so retail locations nationwide.

A Rite Aid spokesperson did not comment directly on the reason for closing the Walnut Street store. On Tuesday when Collins stopped there, many of the shelves were bare.

“A decision to close a store is one we take very seriously and is based on a variety of factors, including business strategy, lease and rent considerations, local business conditions and viability, and store performance,” the spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement.

“We review every neighborhood to ensure our customers will have access to health services, be it at Rite Aid or a nearby pharmacy, and we work to seamlessly transfer their prescriptions so there is no disruption of services,” the spokesperson added.

Rite Aid’s closings are taking place as the corporation relocated its worker-less headquarters to the Navy Yard in South Philadelphia from the Harrisburg area. The ribbon cutting was earlier this month.

“I want to let you all know that this is not an office,” Rite Aid CEO Heyward Donigan said at the ribbon cutting. “This is a collaboration center. There is no one that actually works here on a full-time basis. … We’re here to introduce the new modern way of working and the new modern Rite Aid.”

The new headquarters is expected to save on real estate costs and make it easier for Rite Aid to recruit skilled employees to work remotely.

The other Rite Aids that closed in Philadelphia include ones on the 200 block of S. Broad St., the 300 block of Spring Garden St., and the 2500 block of Island Ave. And there were also two on East Market Street, one on the 700 block in June and the other on the 1000 block in May. The online Rite Aid store locator listed 20 stores in Philadelphia. The closed stores remained as pins on the online map as of this week.

Wendell Young IV, the president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776, which represents Rite Aid employees, said he’s concerned that the company has “closed stores rather than invest in the community and employee safety.”

The Rite Aid at 1900 Arch St. was one of the chain’s newer stores in Philadelphia.

“I knew something was wrong when I went in there that day and they taken out the carts,” said Linda Wallace, who lives nearby and shopped there.

She said she believed Rite Aid removed the carts to thwart shoplifting.

“You would think that it was an ideal location for retail,” Wallace said. “When the workers stopped coming into the office with the pandemic, that hurt them. But there’s a number of apartment buildings there.”