Healthier Rite Aid is boost for industry.(Business)

It's time for people in the chain drug industry to take another look at Rite Aid, whose long, painful turnaround has started to gain traction in recent months.

For more than a decade the company has been widely viewed as something of an invalid, a status that resulted from self-inflicted wounds. Financial irregularities in the late 1990s pushed Rite Aid to the bring of bankruptcy, and for a time there were questions as to whether the drug chain would survive intact.

Bob Miller and Mary Sammons, two former Fred Meyer executives, were brought in to cope with the crisis. The duo did a remarkable job saving the patient, upgrading its condition from critical to stable, …