Tag: pharmacies

In my senior year of high school, and during the summer of my freshman year in college, I worked in a local pharmacy. This wasn’t a chain pharmacy. It was large, and in addition to filling prescriptions has aisles with the usual over-the-counter medications, bandages, and other appurtenances of first aid. There were aisles with makeup and hair products, dental products. There was some stationary, and aisle with the latest magazines. There were almost always customers in the store. The pharmacist and owner was a nice fellow, who was good to chat with. He treated us well. He gave me the first and only holiday bonus I’ve ever received.

Since that time, I’ve had a fondness for local pharmacies, few and far between though they are. There are a couple in our town that compete with the dozens of CVSs, Walgreens, and Rite-Aids within a fairly small radius. It’s not that these pharmacies are bad in any way. Indeed, if they keep their employees for any length of time, they can be good. We’ve known the people in our nearby CVS pharmacy for years, and they know us. But I suspect that is rare in a chain pharmacy, and it is what makes the little ones so special.

A few months ago, one of the small local pharmacies put up a “going out of business” sign. I’d never been inside that particular pharmacy (something for which I felt retroactively guilty after seeing the sign). Their customers were transferred to a pharmacy in Safeway just down the street. Afterwards, for months, the place lay empty, with the name of the pharmacy above like letters carved into a gravestone, a reminder of what was once there.

My experience with pharmacies and pharmacists has been overwhelmingly positive. They are a force for good. They not only fill prescriptions (and know all about side-effects and drug interactions) but they get and answer a wide range of questions from customers, will work with doctors, and always put health and safety first.

So there was something of an irony this morning when I passed the old pharmacy to find a new sign replacing the PHARMACY letters that had been there so long. The new sign read “Smoke & Tobacco” and beneath it was a white banner with red letters that read “Now Open.”

A tobacco shop had replaced the pharmacy.

It is so ironic, that if I were writing a story about this, I might have a pharmacist who made a Faustian bargain to obtain his pharmacy, only to discover that when the bill came due, his pharmacy was turned into a tobacco shop.

The pharmacy that I worked in more than thirty years ago is long gone. It was swallowed up by one of the pharmacy conglomerates. For a time, after selling the business, the owner went to work as a pharmacist for the big company, but I think he retired soon after.

I suspect that a tobacco shop will be more lucrative than the pharmacy was. But it also seems somehow to change the character of that little shopping center. Before there was place that helped people get better. Now there is a place that sells things that can make people sick. I was sad to see the pharmacy go, and a little sadder to see the tobacco shop spring up in its place.