Friday 6 January 2012

Another pharmacy in the village? That would be the Devil's work!

From Rev. Ray Waterman's column in December 2011's Puckeridge & Stanton News:

My latest blogpost: Another pharmacy in the village? That would be the Devil's work!Tweet this! Posted by Mark Wadsworth at 15:37

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17 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very common complaint.
A new pharmacy opens in the doctor's surgery. New doctor's surgeries tend to be located on brand new sites, with brand new buildings. Lots of parking and so on. but not in the High Street.

When the existing pharmacy looks at its lease it might decide it can't/doesn't want to move another location. it would have a building/lease it has to sell/rent on.

But if it doesn't move its lucrative prescription business begins to be lost to the doctors.

In a small enough town,or village one pharmacy will eventually close.
often the one in the high street. So now the 'chemist' is out of town.

6 January 2012 at 18:24
Mark Wadsworth said...

Anon 18.24, let's work with the facts as presented.

What was to stop Ajay doing the sensible thing and relocating to the best site, i.e. "at the far end of Station Road, bear the Doctor's Surgery"?

And why did preventing somebody else doing so "support... the other local businesses"?

6 January 2012 at 19:45
Twenty_Rothmans said...

Postcodes are SG11 1RN and SG11 1TF for the surgery. 0.4 miles.

So you go to the quack, he prescribes something, and you hobble/drive and try to find a parking spot so that you can have it dispensed. Ideal.

If Ajay had been a little more enterprising, he could have expanded and accommodated everyone, adjusting the sizes of his enterprises to match the market.

I wonder if Ajay shows up that often at Reverend Waterman's sermons?

7 January 2012 at 09:51
JuliaM said...

"I wonder if Ajay shows up that often at Reverend Waterman's sermons?"

Or at his Lodge...? ;)

8 January 2012 at 08:34
Anonymous said...

"I wonder if Ajay shows up that often at Reverend Waterman's sermons?"

He! That did occur to me too.

Followed shortly by ..

F'ing useless Church of England clerics. Proselytizing for any religion but their own.

8 January 2012 at 10:02
DBC Reed said...

I'm with the Rev.Having two pharmacies competing for the same customers' spending power does not increase the general wealth.As Anon at top says only one of them is going to be left trading and its not likely to be friendly Ajay in the High Street.
Spent several days searching for creme de cassis in Northampton:all the off licences Threshers, Victoria Wine, Unwins have gone.

8 January 2012 at 10:26
Mark Wadsworth said...

20R, my thoughts exactly.

JM, Anon, that makes the story all the more depressing.

DBC, why are you always so quick to jump to the defence of the monopolist? What's wrong with free competition and giving the consumer the choice?

Why do you assume that Ajay is "friendly" and the new one won't be? The article clearly shows that Ajay is a lazy, manipulative little shit who doesn't really care aboust his customers, don't you think?

8 January 2012 at 11:40
DBC Reed said...

As you probably know, one of the numerous lost causes I support is
Resale Price Maintenance a system by which suppliers can stop supplying shops if the shopkeepers start discounting. So goods have to be sold for the same price in small shops and megastores, so why bother to get car borne to shop in the megastore when you can get all you want from the shops in the High Street or even corner shop?
Unlike LVT , a case to relegalise RPM in the USA went through the American Supreme Court in 2007
(Leegin Creative Leather versus PSKS )and RPM won,slightly unbelievably and against the odds.
Would n't have won in UK where price competition is as seens as natural and God given as HPI.
Despite theological support Ajay will go out of business in the face of competition from a more highly capitalised outfit which can afford to offer many loss leaders ,then ,him out of the way the out of town competition will put their prices up leaving another empty shop in the high street along with the old family butcher's shop, baker's ,fruit and veg shop and off licence.
Please explain how the demise of Thresher's Unwins and Victoria Wine
shows the workings of anti-monopolism,since they all came under the control of First Quench which promptly sold them off.
Likewise the pubs have come under the control of Punch Taverns Beefeater Inns and other property companies which live off the rents paid by the mug tenants.Seeming competitors may really be under the control of huge corporate landowners.
The surprise revival of RPM after circa 100 years does show that old ideas can come back from the dead.But LVT in the Georgite form looks problematic .

8 January 2012 at 20:19
Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC, RPM is one of the lost causes which I do not support. I am a consumer, you know.

"Despite theological support Ajay will go out of business in the face of competition from a more highly capitalised outfit which can afford to offer many loss leaders, then, him out of the way the out of town competition will put their prices up leaving another empty shop in the high street along with the old family butcher's shop, baker's, fruit and veg shop and off licence."

Why do you assume that the new guy is some evil corporation? What if it's Ajay's cousin, who wants to sell medicine to people where it's most convenient? And who says that his old shop will stay empty? It'd still be liable to Business Rates so hopefully somebody else would move in.

Look at it this way - would it be a tragedy if Ajay relocated to the better site and left his old shop vacant, or would you have a law against this as well?

And the pubs mainly died off because of the smoking ban - and if you want to use the tax system to level playing field between pubs, offies and supermarkets, the best thing would be to scrap VAT on booze and hike booze duty accordingly.

8 January 2012 at 20:33
Bayard said...

DBC, any business that competes head-on with the supermarkets is bound to fail. The only way that independents can survive these days is by offering something that the supermarkets can't - knowledge about the product. AFAIR, Thresher's, Unwins and Victoria Wine were just like the supermarkets, you either had to know about what you were buying, or buy on price. Also, they tended to have the same selection of wines as well. Admittedly, the supermarkets do discount heavily sometimes. In the days when I ran an off-licence, we used to buy our stock from the local supermarket when something was heavily discounted and then sell it when their offer had finished (or we'd bought all their stock).

8 January 2012 at 21:40
Anonymous said...

DBC, I object to your demanding that I pay more for my goods and get inferior service, simply in order to support the retail businesses that happen to have your favour. If you want to support them, pay for it yourself.

8 January 2012 at 21:59
Anonymous said...

By the way, Tesco sell creme de cassis.

8 January 2012 at 22:01
DBC Reed said...

If you look up pharmacies and resale price maintenance on Google ,you will see that pharmacies were a special case.(See BBC Pharmacies face a bitter pill) Where RPM generally was abolished in 1964,it was continued for pharmacies until 2000.I assume they wanted to keep the small old fashioned chemists going where you could get some really interesting non-mainstream stuff.Just like you could get really interesting records in independent record stores.Go to Tesco's, which doesn't sell creme de cassis round here(M& S do), and you get a stripped out selection of well-known brand pharmaceutical items.Don't talk about books!
I can't undertand why anti-monopolists spring mindlessly to the defence of Tesco's etc.
It is also surprising that so many people know better,on scant evidence, than the American Supreme Court which took expert advice on the economic and legal aspects of RPM from the Univ of Chicago,not exactly lefties.
Anyway those who bravely support
the retail cartel of Tesco's etc should look at all those denuded streets where no specialist shop is left and congratulate themselves.

9 January 2012 at 00:10
diogenes said...

just wonders why I should patrol the High Street looking for books and other stuff that used to be supported by RPM when I can buy off Amazon/ocado and get someone else to do the walking? What is the intrinsic benefit to me of patrolling the High Street?

9 January 2012 at 02:00
Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC, you are drifting off the topic - the fact that Ajay is too lazy to relocate to a shop which is more convenient for his cutsomers - and resorting to "economic NIMBYism" such as "I can't undertand why anti-monopolists spring mindlessly to the defence of Tesco's". That sounds very much like "If we had LVT then farmers would be forced to sell to developers who would concrete over the South East".

Just because I criticise the monopolistic businesses of a small operator does not mean that I support monopolistic business practices of large operators, does it? I think you'll find that I oppose monopolistic business practices, full stop.

D, I've got all the good records (they stopped making good records years ago) and so I'm not too fussed either way. Must organise myself a Kindle though.

9 January 2012 at 07:41
Bayard said...

Mark, I would go, then my brother, then a friend of ours who worked for us. What really cheered us up was that we could often work out that the supermarket was selling the stuff at a loss.

DBC, the real threat to a town's High St is not having a Tesco in the town, it's having a Tesco in the next town. That way everyone goes to the next town to do their shopping. Even 15 years ago, all the small shops that were going to lose business to supermarkets had already lost it, so those that survived, and in the town I lived in then there were many, including a butcher and, surprisingly, a really crap off-licence, were in favour of having a Tesco in the town.

9 January 2012 at 09:58
DBC Reed said...

The point is not that the big cartel shops do not sell certain items cheaper (though you must have a car to access them which reduces any savings and they make the suppliers/ farmers take the hit for price reductions in promotions) but that there is a reduction of range overall.My search for cassis (ending in not cheap M&S) involved the discovery that the cartel shops sold much the same stuff - like Disororno WTF? A row of specialist shops (with owners living up above?) is better for the shopper than the big Monopoly Blockhouse on the hill to which the brain-dead troop like the Eloi in the George Pal "Time Machine".
Big supermarkets in the UK were not a natural evolution but a deliberate break with established patterns of retail by the same bunch of creepy Conservative Modernisers who abolished Schedule A on houses both within a year: 1963-4.They thought the country should shape up to join the Common Market, another of their enthusiasms.
Mary Portas has n't made much of an impresssion here!

9 January 2012 at 10:20

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