Editing Jack Eckerd (section)

==Career==
Starting in the 1950s, he transformed his family's retail drugstore business into one of the leading self-service drugstore chains in the United States, [[Eckerd Drugs]].  His personal finances were estimated in 1975 by ''[[Forbes]]'' magazine at $150 million.

The Eckerd chain, oldest of the major drugstore companies in the U.S., was founded by Jack's father, J. Milton Eckerd, in [[Erie, Pennsylvania]], in 1898.  After serving as a pilot in [[World War II]], Jack Eckerd started a phenomenal expansion of the chain by buying three stores in [[Florida]] in 1952.  The company  went public as Jack Eckerd Corp. in 1961 and when Eckerd sold his shares in 1986, there were about 1,500 stores.

The chain was later sold to [[J.C. Penney]], who built the number of stores to 2,600 before selling to rivals [[CVS Corporation|CVS]] and [[Jean Coutu Group|Jean Coutu]]. Stores in ten states from Florida west to Arizona became CVS; the stores from Georgia north to New York continued as Eckerd Corporation, run by Jean Coutu's US arm along with its New England–based [[Brooks Pharmacy|Brooks]] chain.

In July 2007 Coutu's 1,549 Eckerd stores across the Mid-Atlantic and New England became part of the [[Rite Aid]] drugstore chain, finally ending more than a century of the Eckerd name in drug retailing.