There Is No Rite Aid to Go To: The Stores Closed and the Brand Sells Blood Tests Now

If you are reading this because you remember a Rite Aid down the road with a photo counter, the short version is that both halves of that memory have expired. The photo service went first, around 2023. Then the shops did.

The brand did not disappear, which is what makes this confusing. Go to riteaid.com today and it loads, the logo is familiar, and it is selling blood tests. Checked on 2026-09-09, the page title reads “Blood Tests Online | Order Lab Work Without a Doctor,” and searching the whole homepage for the words “photo” or “passport” returns nothing at all. Not a discontinued-service notice. Just nothing, because that is not what the company does any more.

What that means if you were planning a trip

Do not plan one. This is the part most write-ups get wrong by answering only the question that was typed.

Plenty of pages will tell you Rite Aid no longer offers passport photos, which is true and useless on its own, because it leaves you thinking there is a Rite Aid to walk into for something else. If your plan was photo first, then a few other errands in the same shop, the whole plan needs rebuilding rather than one line of it.

For the photo specifically, the drugstore counters that remain are Walgreens at $16.99 for two prints with the digital file emailed free, and Staples at $19.99. If you are filing a first-time application rather than renewing by post, the Post Office can accept the paperwork itself and treats the photo as an optional $15 add-on.

The pattern worth noticing

Rite Aid’s photo counter did not close because the company was uniquely troubled. Costco shut its photo department at every location in February 2021 for reasons it stated plainly: people take more photographs than ever and print almost none of them. Target went the same way. The retail photo counter is a shrinking category, and passport photos were a small survivor riding on infrastructure that existed for holiday prints.

That is worth knowing because it predicts where the remaining counters are: the chains still doing it are the ones where printing is a core business rather than a legacy department. Walgreens still prints photos at scale. FedEx Office and Staples print for a living. Those are the ones likely to still be there next year.

Doing it without a counter

One Dollar Passport Photo costs $1. Upload a picture, the background is replaced and the frame is cropped to the 2x2 inch specification, and you see the finished result watermarked before paying anything. It gives you a six-up print sheet, which any surviving drugstore counter will print for around 39 cents, plus the digital file if you are renewing online. The US passport photo page has the current specification.

The honest limit is the same as ever: you are the photographer. If what you actually valued about the old Rite Aid counter was a person handling it while you stood there, the closest replacement is another counter, not a phone. It just will not be that one.