Pulling the Chain

I’ve been sitting on this post for a while.

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods. You hear that a lot, and it’s true. Chatham, Sauganash, Bronzeville, South Shore all have distinct characters, histories, and loyalties. What they increasingly share is a Walgreens closing. ABC7 ran a story last month about Chatham residents furious over the upcoming closure of the Walgreens at 86th and Cottage Grove. The story is mostly a string of quotes from upset residents, and the upset is real. One man managing kidney transplants and diabetes who takes 14 pills a day, a woman in an electric wheelchair who lives down the block. These are sympathetic people facing a genuine inconvenience, maybe worse.

But the story raises questions it never bothers to ask. I did some quick checking, the kind of thing a reporter could do in twenty minutes. After this closure, Chatham still has three major chain drugstores and several independent local pharmacies. This is not a pharmacy desert. The nearest replacement Walgreens is 1.3 miles away, and Walgreens is even offering 90 days of free prescription delivery to ease the transition.

Here’s some useful context ABC7 didn’t offer: I live in Sauganash, a neighborhood with a very different demographic profile than Chatham. Right now, today, I am as far from my nearest Walgreens as Chatham residents will be after the closure. Nobody is writing outrage stories about Sauganash.
One alderman called this “pharmaceutical genocide.” Another called for charging Walgreens with “first degree corporate abandonment.” That’s vivid language. But Walgreens isn’t a public utility. It’s a company that expanded aggressively into neighborhoods across Chicago for decades, then, when shrinking its footprint made business sense, started closing stores. That’s what large national chains do. They have no covenant with the neighborhood. They never did.

The actual story here isn’t Walgreens’s betrayal. It’s that somewhere along the way, communities stopped patronizing local pharmacies and shifted their loyalty and their prescriptions to national chains that were cheaper and more convenient. The local pharmacist who knew your name and would make a delivery in a pinch got replaced by a corporation that optimizes for shareholder value. When that corporation decides your neighborhood is no longer worth the trouble, you discover that the relationship was always one-sided.

Chatham’s anger is understandable. But the lesson isn’t that Walgreens owes the neighborhood more. It’s that neighborhoods can’t outsource their civic infrastructure to companies whose headquarters are in Deerfield and whose loyalty runs exactly as deep as the profit margin.