Yesterday Madilynne Medina filed her latest article for SFGATE, the Web site for the San Francisco Chronicle. The headline title for that article was: “San Francisco's pharmacy crisis deepens with another store closure.” The store was a CVS pharmacy located at 701 Van Ness Avenue. This happens to be right across the street from where I live in Opera Plaza. When I first moved to that place, I could walk one block to the north to a Walgreens. I cannot remember when it went out of business, but it was probably more than a decade ago, making CVS the “alternative of choice” whether I liked it or not.
The good news was that I could engage with just about anyone working there. All encounters with the pharmacy went smoothly; and, for the most part, I could get along with the staff managing the rest of the shop. Probably the greatest frustration came from the need to have a staff member present to unlock any door to provided access to the item I needed. This was the “solution” to dealing with shoplifters. I remember a time when the floor had a security guard, but that is now in a distant past.
The most important sentence in the the Chronicle article is the following:
CVS did not cite an exact reason for the closure, but the company said some of the factors it considers are “market dynamics, population shifts and a community’s store density.”
My guess is that those at the level of management that decided on this closure did not realize that those factors were little more than what George Orwell call “newspeak.” In Orwell’s context, this amounts to providing for a reason to go through with an undertaking without first considering the resulting assets and/or liabilities.
The irony is that CVS became the only “pharmacy of choice” for my neighborhood after which it had abruptly eliminated Walgreen’s from the neighborhood. Now, the only “choice” that customers will have will be to start using the CVS at 1059 Hyde Street, which is about a mile to the west of the shop being closed. Of course, I have never had trouble walking the distance of a mile, but only as long as I did not have to contend with bad weather in the process. Given how many things seem to be going wrong in this situation, Murphy’s Law would add that any such walk will inevitably involve bad weather!
San Francisco City Hall (photograph by Mike Hofmann, from the National Register of Historical Places in San Francisco, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license)
For my generation, the usual reaction to this situation is: “There Oughta Be a Law!” This was a comic strip that took on (as the Wikipedia page puts it) “minor absurdities, frustrations, hypocrisies, ironies and misfortunes of everyday life.” I think about that every time I look at the City Hall dome as I walk down Van Ness Avenue. Sadly, I once responded to an invitation to see our City Council in session. I came away thinking about those absurdities and frustrations, wondering whether, as in thermodynamics, governance is entropic, meaning (in simpler words) that disorder will always prevail over order!
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