The business has been around for 80 years and the building was recently renovated in 2012.

The building’s awning reads, “Buckley’s Drug Store and Compounding Center.” Customers enter an old-fashioned pharmacy owned by a man who greets them by name and asks about their day. Puzzled by the word compounding, they learn their medications are made from scratch to tailor their needs. The store, on the tree-lined streets of Englewood, New Jersey, reflects the charm of a family owned business and specialized medication.

A bell rings to signal your arrival when you open the door. Gil Dominguez can be seen filling patient’s prescriptions with sounds of pounding, conversation, and old school music filling the air.

For the last 30 years, 10 hours a day, Mr. Dominguez has successfully run Buckley’s, on Palisades Avenue, with his own personal touch despite the difficulties he faces.

Dominguez is always seen in his white lab coat and smiling at customers.

From childhood, he has been surrounded by the world of medicine, following in the footsteps of his aunt and father-in-law who owned a pharmacy in Cuba. His father, struggling to pave the way for a prosperous life for his children, embarked on a journey to fulfill his family’s dreams.

“I grew up watching my aunt work and one day I started to ask questions,” he said. “I saw all the great things she could do for her patients and I knew I wanted to do something with a professional license in a business environment.”

With that dream, Dominguez worked in a number of pharmaceutical firms and hospitals until he acquired Buckley’s, where he works with his wife and son. Passing down family values, Dominguez said he hopes “we can be here for another 30 plus years.”

Mixing family with business has presented several challenges in his struggle to survive and remain current.

“My wife takes care of the gift shop and social media publicity while my son assists with compounding medications and patient care,” he said. “Families fight but we only get stronger.”

The key to Dominguez’s success is how he serves his customers in ways chain pharmacies such as Walgreens or the CVS down the street cannot. Although 41 percent of Americans buy their prescriptions at chain stores according to ConsumerReports.org, Dominguez builds his business by accommodating patient’s needs, schedules, and requests, creating an intimate atmosphere not possible among chain stores. In an age where humans are numbers on a computer, or voice-acted recordings, customers appreciate that Dominguez remembers their face and medical history.

“This industry has to be personalized,” he said. People don’t just come to your store because it’s a pharmacy, they come because they have a trust.”

A loyal customer and Englewood resident, Annette Amirian, has been going to Buckley’s for 12 years. She relies on Dominguez to provide her family with prescriptions in a timely fashion.

She said, “I go to Gil because I believe he monitors what types of medications I’m taking and truly cares for my well-being.”

This relationship between patient and pharmacist does not just exist within the Buckley’s building. Dominguez admits to seeing a lot of his customers at the local grocery store down the street.

Dominguez crushing pills to compound medications.

“Englewood is a close community,” he said. “When I go pick up some milk, it will take me 15 minutes because I bump into patients and start talking.”

Dominguez’s goal is simple: to please patients and monitor their care. Buckley’s specializes in compounding medications to fit patient’s needs in the lab on the second floor. If a patient can’t take an oral medication, he looks for an alternative such as a cream or a suppository to be taken.

A highlight of his job is when Dominguez is able to help someone get a medication that the insurance company refuses to pay for. “Although it is not simple to override a medication that the insurance company didn’t cover,” he said. “When I can, I know I’ve done something good for my patient.”

Dominguez takes the good with the bad as he finds himself struggling with today’s technological advancements that have caused a decline in sales due to online mail orders. Certain prescriptions have a rider available through mail order for maintenance drugs such as blood pressure, asthma, or diabetes medications that can only be filled through a PBM, a pharmacy benefit manager. The idea is to get people to use lower cost mail order services instead of having prescriptions filled at their local drugstores.

“Over the last 15 years, I would say I lost a lot of customers because of this,” he said. “Let’s say a family of four uses mail orders, that’s four patients that I’ve lost.”

His problems all “come down to dollars and cents.” About 10-15 times a day, Dominguez calls insurance companies to make sure he was reimbursed when he was supposed to or calls to receive a prior authorization from a doctor to cover a prescription before he can refill it.

“A simple procedure that takes five minutes can take 30 minutes because of a constant back and forth between doctors and insurance companies,” he said.