Why I’m Boycotting CVS Pharmacy

CVS has stuck it’s thumb in the eye of midtown Kansas City and the Westport Historical Society, as well as the local economy, by purchasing the Osco (Historically it was Katz Drug at Westport and Main) which also serves as a department store in the inner city, and has for sixty years or more. They purchased the store so they can shut it down, because it is the main competition to the small, newly-constructed CVS store at 39th and Main, a short block away.

Jane Flynn is rolling in her grave. (Jane was a long time local historian. She passed way last winter.) Will a local emerge to lead a campaign (I’m not a local) to restore the store, and the soda fountain and the mezzanine, and make it the way it was when my father-in-law was a young man, standing in the pharmacy line of that very store at closing time with a prescription for cough syrup and penicillin for three?

The Jewish Katz Family (full disclosure, the matriarch of that family used to be my patient and she told me many raucous tales about the original pharmacy, before the family sold to Skaggs, which became Osco) hired the first black pharmacists to serve white customers in the city. (This is a city that denied Will Chamberlain lunch on his way to play ball for KU. He almost turned around and went back to Philly on the spot.) This was a truly historic stance to take back in the days of the Civil Rights Movement. Yes, they lost some business, but they gained a lot more. The stores significance to the black community in this city is depicted on the mural that covers the Main Street side of the building above the brick wainscoating.

Besides the obvious historic insult, Osco was (is) unionized, and midtown needs the good-paying union jobs with security and benefits. Midtown is what we call a “Gentrifying Neighborhood” which means that rents, property prices and taxes keep rising, but we still hear gunfire and car alarms regularly. Professionals are moving in (guilty of that myself) and the poor people are being pushed farther east as we take over the majestic old red brick apartments and turn many of them into condos.

But the crime rate existed when we moved here – we knew that – we just put bars on the windows and go on about enjoying our neighborhood, which includes deli’s, coffee shops, bistros, streetside cafes, bi-lingual store signs, Westport, the Plaza, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Kansas City Art Institute, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Liberty Memorial and Union Station, a community college campus and two urban universities, as well as two world-class scientific research facilities; and more restaurants than I can patronize in a year – all within walking distance of my apartment.

Every decent paying job that midtown can offer to the working class is necessary if our neighborhood is to maintain it’s diversity of race, ethnicity, religion, and economic class. In other words, the artists and the things that give our neighborhood its charm, the reasons many of us choose to live here. I like hearing Spanish and Chinese and Bosnian and Arabic and Yoruba and Urdu and Hindi. I like the street musicians, the bus stop a block away, and having no lawn to mow. I don’t want all the units to go condo – I want diversity. I don’t want what happened in every diverse neighborhood of artists, musicians, and the ethnically varied I’ve ever seen to happen here. I don’t want private security patrols and gated condo complexes and neighborhood associations. Then I would have to leave. (That’s too much like living on a military base for my taste. I’ve had an officer get out and measure the grass on my lawn. No thanks, never again.)

It was bad enough when Joe’s Burger Joint on Main closed to become a Starbuck’s, within six blocks of two other Starbucks, but this CVS thumb-in-the-eye is just too much!

Any local who emerges to lead the charge to stop what’s happening in our neighborhood, I’m behind you four square. I’m just no Clay Chastain. I know what this town thinks of outsiders leading initiatives, and I would never doom a cause I care about by attempting to lead such a drive.

Meanwhile, as I wait for a leader to emerge to champion the Katz building, I will start by encouraging a boycott of CVS, and engaging in one myself.