TLDR: The tennants are mostly still paying their Monthly leases, and the rates are often higher than what a small company, or a company that wants to partially use that space would pay.
Surprised that the leases weren't tied to some shell company that could go bankrupt and release that liability.
For the GP: Even though these leases are above current market value, they were probably cheaper at the time they were signed due to being long-term and bring signed by a higher credit rated tenant who would likely not default (vs a short-term lease with a riskier tenant)
Obviously there are a lot of factors that go into a negotiation and sometimes landlords are not able to secure those rental streams through one of those methods.
As the article points out, the big box pharmacies have been replaced by smaller more drug focused ones, it's just the big chain heavy retail footprint places that are fewer in number. But those new pharmacies aren't going into the big spaces of the old, and it's possible that the needs for C2 storage, cold storage, etc. make it more difficult to work with the space for a purely retail or food concept.
Though the “we just do meds” pharmacies are dying out in Canada as the margin is increasingly in the unregulated (price) over-the-counter products and you increasingly need the buying power of being a part of a chain for both meds and over-the-counter stuff.
Sure if you can specialize in something you can survive against the chains, but it’s a slog.
1: She works in a hospital now, so she's not directly exposed to this, but she's worked in retail before and has plenty of friends who still do.