No-Birth Control Pharmacy Closes
Divine Mercy Pharmacy, located in Northern Virginia, recently closed. Its closure was the subject of a rather snarky op-ed in the Washington Post. Nonetheless, the op -ed raises some good questions about moral commitment in our contemporary world.
In particular, it makes me realize that in a capitalist society, one’s moral viewpoint is one thing, but the intensity of that viewpoint is something else, and for some purposes more important. It’s one thing to oppose birth control. It’s something else again to be willing to go out of one’s way to a no-birth control pharmacy. (Though it doesn’t sound too inconvenient here.) It’s possible, after all, just to glide on past the birth control aisle at CVS.and on to the cough medicine.
A second issue is the way in which societal standards about non-moral issues affect our moral decision-making. Call it the “normalcy” factor. Most things you buy from a pharmacy have nothing to do with birth control. So you would expect that people who want other things might just stop at a pharmacy like Divine Mercy from time to time, even if they do use birth control. By analogy, non-vegetarians do sometimes eat at vegetarian restaurants–they’re not opposed to it.
This suggests to me that the pharmacy might not have looked like a normal pharmacy–and thereby raised questions in the eyes of potential customers, whether they were opposed to birth control or not.
We have expectations for what a pharmacy will look like that have nothing whatsoever to do with birth control. When I walk into a CVS, it looks like what I expect a pharmacy to look like–and has all the stuff I expect a pharmacy to have –from cosmetics to usb drives. Because my expectations are met, I trust that the quality will be good.
I don’t know, but I wonder if people felt uneasy because DMP didn’t look like a “normal” pharmacy in other respects. My guess is that DMP focused on being a pharmacy, narrowly construed. That’s the best way to explain why there were no cosmetics–which, the last time I checked, weren’t against Catholic teaching. You probably couldn’t get soup, soda, or wine there either.
The trouble is that there are no pharmacies narrowly construed anymore, and this has changed our expectations of what a pharmacy is. And while some people might be willing to go out of their way to a no-birth control pharmacy, it’s asking a lot more of them to go to something that doesn’t look like a modern pharmacy at all.
Prophetic witness –on a number of issues — may be a good thing. But it’s hard to fit prophetic witness into a viable business plan.
Yes, the editorial is unnecessarily snarky.
I think the real story here is that family-owned enterprises just can’t compete with chains, and loyalty to locally owned businesses weakens as people move from town to town following careers.
Our village family-owned pharmacy closed 10 years ago, and we now have to drive 10 miles for our prescriptions, cosmetics, and OTCs (though the local grocery store does carry some of these items at jacked-up prices).
Friends of my parents owned a drugstore in my hometown for three generations. As teenagers, my friends and I would walk down there to try on make-up, browse the paperback books, and flirt with the pharmacist’s son who worked the counter.
Sadly, they had to sell the store five years ago b/c they couldn’t compete with the chains who have economies of sale on their side?
A sole-propriety operation like DMP is hobbled by chain competition from the get-go, unless they can undercut sales by a big margin.
There was a family owned pharmacy in the last town I lived in, and I always wanted to like shopping there. I didn’t. It felt too small, and there were too many things I had to interact with the staff to get. It’s not that I was embarrassed about the things I was buying, but I’ve become a child of my era, and I just prefer the anonymity of modern shopping. I want to dwell in the aisle, pick up several boxes of similar products, compare — not ask the person at the counter for advice. I suppose if I knew the family or wanted to flirt with the counter person it would be different!
(I lived in England in the early 70s, and whenever I flip past an episode of the BritCom “Are You Being Served?” I remember the days when it was simply expected that a sales person would greet you when you entered a shop — it would drive me crazy now).
Mark, yes, shopping habits and etiquette have surely changed.
I’m not particularly outgoing, and most of the time I shop online for convenience, but I still view “live” shopping as an occasion of sorts. I dress up, make arrangements to meet a friend for lunch between shops, and I always feel kinda disappointed when I spend a day hitting book and yarn stores and the clerks aren’t interested in chatting with me about my selections, offering advice, showing me new stuff, or signing me up for a newsletter or something.
At my age, though, flirting would probably now be taken as a sign of senility.
Maybe it’s more family pharmacy vs chanin pharmacy than ethics-based pharmacy vs non-ethics-based pharmacy. There are places like Whole Foods that is sort of ethics based …. organic food, vegetarian stuff, etc. …. that do very well, perhaps also becaue they’re a big chain. I do think though that a pharmacy that won’t sell contraceptives is in some ways being unethical as it makes it harder for people to fill their legitimate prescriptions.
You should go to Queens. There are pharmacies that are just pharmacies and, of course, carry those necessities, candy and soda. But, the Walgreens have moved in too, so I suppose Queens will go the way of the rest of the country. Maybe Divine Mercy should try Queens.
I patronize a big retail chain, because it’s convenient (it adjoins my grocery store – I don’t even have to step outside to get to the pharmacy) and economical (my insurance plan charges me a lower co-pay if I get my prescriptions there). They do fill birth control prescriptions and sell condoms, as well as liquor, and the grocery store sells cigarettes. But I don’t smoke, don’t buy condoms, don’t get birth control perscriptions. Admittedly, I do occasionally get a bottle of wine there, but alcohol consumed in moderation isn’t sinful. As for the other things: the cooperation with evil is too remote to give me a twinge.
Consumer behavior is very powerful. Trying to fight it by withholding consumer choice is not usually a winning formula for a business owner. A better way is to try to influence consumers to freely choose to do the right thing. A Wendy’s triple baconator is loaded with calories, salt and grams of fat, but nobody forces me to order it. If Wendy’s sold only low-fat items, it would soon go out of business, causing all sorts of other bad outcomes.
If the owners of that pharmacy want to dissuade people from using artificial birth control, there are better ways of going about it.