The Village Board of Trustees in my home town of Buffalo Grove recently voted to approve the building of a CVS Pharmacy on the northeast corner of Dundee and Buffalo Grove Roads. The vote was controversial because there is already a glut of big pharmacies in our town of about 43,000 residents, including several Walgreen's, several Osco Drug stores (Jewel-Osco is part Albertson's), and pharmacies in Dominick's Finer Foods (Safeway), and Cub Foods (SuperValu), plus independents such as Mark Drugs, as well as pharmacies in Wal-Mart and Sam's Club just across the border in Wheeling.
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When the village held hearings about whether to add yet another pharmacy to the
town, I testified against it. Do we really need yet another big-box drug
store in Buffalo Grove? We're like a one-trick pony, where all we know how
to do is strip malls and drug stores. Can't we add another type of store,
like a big computer store, a big book store or something else, anything else,
that we don't already have ten of?
It reminds me of how my daughter always asks me
to buy her a stuffed animal for her every time we go shopping. I usually
tell her, "No." Sometimes I say, "Yes," to another
stuffed animal, but only on rare occasions and for a specific reason, such as a
reward for outstanding conduct. She already has about a hundred of them,
plus what her 19-year-old brother doesn't sleep with. We have other needs
for our limited financial resources besides the purchase of more of what we
already have too many of. Similarly, this community has other needs than
just having a drug store, bank, gas station or grocery store on every prime
corner in town.
The reason for all the drug stores is
"me-too" marketing. "Their" job is to find a
profitable use for a business site. "Our" job is to promote
competition while ensuring a variety of services (uses). "They"
see big-box pharmacies throughout town making money and say, "Me, too!
That works in Buffalo Grove, so let's copy that model and then we, too,
will have something that works." What we then get stuck with is a
glut of copy-cat uses without variety. The glut then results in an
oversupply, where nobody makes money and inventory gets stale (doesn't turn
over) because there are too many places, all with the same stuff. The key,
then, is to have enough competition to keep prices reasonable, but not so many
of one type that
a) nobody can make money and
b) other uses are crowded out.
The glut is what has happened with regards to grocery stores. We allowed
so many to be built so close to each other that Wild Oats Market went out of
business, the Eagle Foods
store in the Town Center went out of business, and Cub Foods, also in the Town
Center, is certainly doomed.
Even if we can sustain that many pharmacies with
marginal profitability,
other desirable uses are being crowded out.
Village officials have taken the position that the a pharmacy is a permitted use under the zoning for the land. If I was on the Village Board, I would have tried much harder to discourage the use of the land for yet another pharmacy and sought to generate a different use for the property. I hope that, in your town, you don't repeat the mistakes of Buffalo Grove officials by allowing a few business uses to be repeated over and over to the point that many other desirable uses are crowded out.
Rob Sherman P. O. Box
7410
Buffalo Grove, IL 60089-7410
A post office box is used
because
the street address uses a curb mail box,
which is not secure.
Telephone: (847) 870-0700
Fax: (847) 870-1156
E-mail: rob followed by the at symbol followed by robsherman dot com