The NACDS Total Store Expo opens on Saturday, August 15, at the Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center in Boston and runs through Monday, August 17. The 2025 edition was held August 23 to 25 at the San Diego Convention Center. The move east is the least interesting thing about this year's show.

What makes TSE worth reading is its structure. Most trade shows are built around a floor and treat meetings as an add-on. TSE is built around the meetings and treats the floor as the place you go afterwards. For anyone trying to understand how a beauty product ends up on a shelf at a chain with thousands of doors, that inversion is the whole story.

Saturday is the show

The first full day is given over to Meet the Market, from 9:00 to 5:00. The format is deliberately unromantic: the retail buyer keeps a table, the supplier walks to it, the appointment lasts ten minutes, and there are two minutes to get to the next one. NACDS schedules the appointments itself. A company gets one schedule and can seat two people. The program carries no fee, but you need an exhibit booth to take part.

In 2025 that machinery produced more than 5,600 meetings.

The room is also broader than the association's name suggests. The buyers NACDS brings are not only chain pharmacy. They come from supermarkets, club, mass merchants, convenience, dollar and specialty retail. A beauty brand walking that room is pitching the entire mass channel in one day, which is exactly why the ten minutes are worth studying on their own terms. We took the format apart here.

Saturday's programming runs alongside it: a leadership panel at 12:30, a session on the future of retail health stores at 1:45, and the NACDS Institute on pharmacy innovation at 3:15. The NACDS Foundation closes the day with its 28th annual dinner at the Omni Boston Hotel at the Seaport, with Jim Gaffigan as the evening's headliner.

The Omni Boston Hotel at the Seaport on the left and the Menino Convention & Exhibition Center on the right, seen from Summer Street
Two hundred metres apart on Summer Street: the Omni Boston Hotel at the Seaport, where the Foundation dinner is held, and the convention center that holds the rest of the show. Photo: 4300streetcar, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sunday and Monday

The Business Program takes Sunday morning at 8:00, with General David Petraeus, US Army (Ret.), as keynote. The exhibit hall opens at 10:00 and stays open until 5:00, with lunch served inside it, a scheduling choice that keeps traffic on the floor through the middle of the day. A reception closes the evening.

Monday morning holds the part of the program we will be reading most closely. Five Insight Sessions run at 8:00, covering pharmacy trends, FDA policy on nonprescription drugs, GLP-1 therapies, artificial intelligence in retail, and NDC regulations. The hall reopens at 9:30. The show closes Monday night with the Boston Extravaganza and a set by AJR.

Three things to watch, from a beauty desk

1. Whether GLP-1 stays a pharmacy conversation. It is on Monday's agenda as a drug therapy topic, which is where the chains still file it. The front end has already moved: GLP-1 driven hair shedding and skin laxity are quietly pulling the scalp care category along with them, and the products answering that demand are being formulated by companies who exhibit at beauty shows, not pharmacy ones. A retailer that treats the two agendas as separate is leaving the adjacency to somebody else.

2. What the front end is for. The Saturday session on the future of retail health stores is the one that decides how much square footage beauty gets to keep. Chains that lean into health services need the front of the store to earn its space, and beauty is the category that has historically been asked to do that earning.

3. Which buyers actually show up. Meet the Market is the most honest census of the mass channel available in a single day. After the last eighteen months, the interesting question is not how many suppliers came, it is how many distinct retail organizations are still sending buyers. The channel has consolidated hard, and a shorter buyer list changes the economics of every brand trying to enter it.

The context nobody at the show will need explained

This is the first Total Store Expo since Rite Aid finished liquidating and closed its last two stores at the end of September 2025, and the first since Sycamore Partners took Walgreens private in a deal valued at roughly 10 billion dollars. CVS spent 2025 absorbing former Rite Aid locations and prescription files while closing several hundred of its own.

The chain drug industry that meets in Boston this weekend is smaller and more concentrated than the one that met in San Diego a year ago. Fewer buyers, larger books, and ten minutes to make your case.

Retail to See is following the show from the beauty and front-end angle, and will report on what the floor and the buyer program say about where mass beauty is heading in 2027.