Independent pharmacies helped form the landscape of my youth and early adulthood. Each community had one, usually near the center of town. In addition to health products, most offered a good selection of newspapers, magazines and greeting cards. A wide assortment of candy was a staple and some even had a soda counter with light refreshments. These businesses employed people from the area whose task-oriented jobs were to manage materials and service customers. The pharmacists were generally well-educated and a bit reticent, preferring the pace, intimacy and independence of a local pharmacy to working in a hospital. Their remedies included medications and good advice about your ailments, sympathy cards and compassion for your losses, and a range of antacids to reduce the indigestion of spicy food and local politics. Pharmacies were more than dispensaries, they were community spaces.
Despite providing necessary services and clear value to their communities, independent pharmacies have all but disappeared in my region (Massachusetts, southern New Hampshire). Nationally, there are nearly 45% fewer today than there were in the 1980s1 and this decline has occurred amidst an explosion in pharmaceutical sales. People have simply adopted other ways to meet their needs. They fill their prescriptions by mail. They get health information via the internet. They get refreshments at the drive-thru. And they purchase goods from retail giants that offer all the products independent pharmacies do, and more.
A thousand cuts versus a single blow drained the viability from these community fixtures. Across the nation, community by community, independent pharmacies have struggled and closed. As I said, they’re pretty much gone where I live. Although a few news outlets connected the dots along the way, the closings were viewed as local matters. I remember people used to talk about them (“Hey, have you heard McCarthy’s Pharmacy over in Shrewsbury is closing?“) but the change occurred so steadily over so many years that people stopped talking about it. After a while there just wasn’t anything left to say.
1Sarah Moses, “New independent pharmacy in Lyncourt fills need for personal touch“, The Post-Standard, January 31, 2010.
So funny that you mention independent pharmacies as I was just visiting Natick, MA which retains the Jones Rexall in its still thriving downtown, and I thought how weird that was as I haven’t seen anything but chain drugstores in this country for years-they just don’t seem to have them out West anymore.
Hi Justine – what do make of my implied comparison with public libraries?
I wonder if libraries, like independent pharmacies, will whittle down to just a few Superbranches? Where then will my students hangout, pick up a good read, find research, use a computer? Perhaps it will all be on ebooks and the internet? What will happen to the hardworking folks who cannot afford internet, computers and much less a Kindle? Will their need for access to information be denied the way their pharmaceutical needs have been?
Superbranches … you may be on to something there. Public libraries are very similar now, do you think the public would notice — or mind if they were taken over and run like big boxes?
Thought you might be interested in this comment from January. For the coming decade, reader SpongeBob Librarypants predicted:
- 10% of public libraries will thrive
- 10% will fold
- 80% will hobble along as “the information social services organization for those who cannot afford home computers and broadband Internet access”.