CVS PHARMACY NOT Just What You're Looking For

Since early 1997, when I first created this web, until late 1999, this page was a page given over to extravagant praise of CVS/Pharmacy, a drug store chain based in Rhode Island with stores in 26 states... and counting. When I first set up this page, I was a CVS fanatic and CVS could do no wrong. I had just moved down to Georgia and was very excited when CVS bought out Revco and moved into the Atlanta area. I wanted everyone to know about their great deals, their excellent customer service, all the great store-brand products, and just everything about them. About a year into their move into Georgia, however, CVS started getting ugly. With the burden of having to train so many former Revco employers as well as new employees, their customer service declined and I began to run to a lot of employees who just didn't know how to run their stores. And with so many newly converted stores, I began to see a great variation in the quality of stores -- some were ritzy, some were total dumps. But the decline in CVS as a store is really the least that concerns me. The real problem I have with CVS is in the way it has begun to operate as a company. Not only do they seem to have switched to being a greedy, monopolistic market-grabber like Wal-Mart -- pushing smaller chains and independents out of business and/or buying them out -- but they have become completely irresponsible when it comes to land use and being part of the community. Back when I was a fan of CVS, back before they because huge, CVS had stores in malls, strips, downtowns, in the inner city. Around then time of their buyout of Revco, CVS decided it was going to a new "prototype" store -- a free-standing store with a drive-in. As a company, CVS decided to say "forget it" to fitting into existing communities and switched to the notorious 7-11 approach of building the same store everywhere, no matter what. Here in Atlanta CVS seems to be going out of its way to intrude into neighborhoods with big, free-standing stores with parking lots in front and drivethroughs. The stores are big and boxy and in many cases don't in any way fit in with existing, traditional look of surrounding neighborhoods. They're "pleasant" but not the kind of thing that belongs in the city. And they won't even consider re-using existing buildings or moving into new or renovated space in shopping centers. Instead, they insist on a nasty suburban model of development that assumes people all come in cars and that you have to have a lot of parking to exist as a business. I have heard that CVS is wanting to shut down all its stores that aren't in the free-standing model. In New England, where there's the heaviest concentration of stores, that would mean closing, for no apparent reason, hundreds of stores -- just so they can build their new, nasty, free-standing stores everywhere, and close stores that have served people for years. The old stores were in downtowns and served people well. The new stores may be bigger, but they won't be better. I am very disappointed with CVS. I really admired them as they used to be -- a good place to shop, a good corporate citizen, a good employer that took care of its employees. Now it's just like most places. I still shop there because they're the best drug store in the area, but I don't fawn over them like I used to and instead of my old fan letters, I write them letters about their stores saying, "Are you crazy to want to build that ugly box in that nice neighborhood?" If you're like me and am sick of CVS, I suggest you go to their web site, http://www.cvs.com and write them some email. Make it clear that they need to care about more than customers' money -- they need to care about the customers' neighborhoods and also realize that if they don't care about them they won't get get the customers money because there's going to be a backlash. More and more, people care about their neighborhoods and they don't want big chains coming in and setting then tone. So let them know!