- We already have two chain drug stores, Rite-Aid (formerly Brooks) and CVS.
- They're building on the wrong side of the street. Route 122A is the major route through town, bringing traffic to and from Worcester and the Interstate highways. Traffic is bumper-to-bumper southbound in the morning and bumper-to-bumper northbound in the afternoon. (At the point that 122A goes through down, it's more of a northwest-southeast road.)
The new pharmacy is on the southwest side of the road. Homeward bound traffic, then, has to make a left turn to get into the store, slowing the already traffic, and then cross the lanes again to resume the trip. Locating the pharmacy on the right side of the road (the northeast side) would ease the impact on the traffic flow.
Does a town of sixteen and half thousand people need three chain pharmacies with the third one on the wrong side of the road for the traffic flow? Walgreen's seems to be doing ok, business-wise, so we might think that they know what they're doing. It seems to me, however, that this is a lot of expense and a lot of noise to solve a problem that we really don't have. In addition, it will make the ride through the center of town even more difficult, pushing more traffic onto narrow side roads.
3 comments:
I have a Walgreens and a CVS both about a half-mile away from me. Walgreens is on the opposite side of a VERY busy street, at the wrong corner of an even busier intersection. I hardly ever go there, because even on the rare days I happen to be coming from the right direction, it's still too difficult to navigate the turn into the parking lot.
We're getting a new Walgreens too in addition to our existing CVS. They have to evict tenants from several rental apartments, tear the buildings down, and build at the empty and deserted end of town, made more so by the fact that those tenants won't be living there anymore.
And why? Certainly not to serve the town -- in fact, that never came up in the zoning discussions. Really, it's about being able to count the number of new stores open at year end so that their shareholders will drive the price up. It's a weird business strategy if you ask me.
This is something I contemplate often. You see this everywhere. It's more predominant in large cities (like the corner of St Mark's and 3rd St, where three starbucks are literally located within 1/4 block of each other).
In this time of great economic hardship, I notice that banks, Fallon Clinics, and Pharmacies are the majority of what's being built around here.
It's all part of the McDonaldization of our society, where every town looks just like every town. Sad really
Post a Comment