Bridget Rowan is the owner of O’Hearn’s Pharmacy in Cambridge, N.Y., one of two independent pharmacies remaining in my county. She is no dinosaur. She is young, savvy, up-to-date on everything pharmaceutical and comfortable with technology. Yet she is also a throwback to another time, when small businesses dominated the economy and the people who sold things to people knew who they were.
Bridget knows every one of her customers by name, and she has come to the aid or rescue of just about all of them at one time or another. Everybody in town has a Bridget-saved-me story, including me.. When you do business with her, you get her home number as well as the pharmacy number, and don’t, she insists, hesitate to call. If you need some medicine in the middle of the night, you can come by and get her and drive her to the pharmacy, she will help you out. It was once commonplace, it is now unheard of.
Bridget worked at a corporate pharmacy once and when she moved on to another job after several years, she realized she had never spoken to but a handful of the pharmacy’s customers, she simply filled prescriptions all day. She said she wouldn’t know ten of her customers if she ran into them on the street. She seems to know everyone in town by name.
She resolved to be different when she took over her father’s pharmacy and she is. Bridget, you may recall, was pushed to the brink during the Christmas season when the building next to her, long condemned, nearly toppled over. She was permitted to remain in the pharmacy (wearing a hardhat) , but customers had to go to a small room a bit down the block to place and take their orders. She lost a lot of sales and revenue because no one could shop in the store during her busiest time townspeople do a lot of their Christmas shopping in her store. The town rallied to her and made their way past fences and signs – they had to park down the street – and waited in lines in the small room where Margaret and Olive took orders.
As far as anyone knows, she lost one customer, a grumpy man – everybody knows who he is. She won’t miss him.
It was a powerful thing to see how much the town cared about Bridget and her pharmacy, how determined everyone was to stick with her and see it through, as she has seen so many of them through some hard times. Small towns struggle everywhere, rural America has been forgotten by politicians and economists in the age of the global economy.
It is very hard for independent businesses like pharmacies to compete with chains, most of them have gone under. In my town we have a thriving independent bookstore and a thriving independent pharmacy, two very good reasons to live here. Bridget is still working to get her parking spaces back and the fences and debris all removed, but the real threat is gone, the building next door has been demolished. Her customers can walk through the pharmacy and buy lotions, even handbags, as well as get their prescriptions filled.
Small towns are not perfect or idyllic places, they have their share of serious problems and there are plenty of people who are not very nice or who don’t get along. But there is a sense of community and connection here that evokes a richer past and reminds us of what it means to be known. It means a lot.
I missed Bridget when she was hidden away during her winter of discontent, it is good and reassuring to see her at her pill-mixing station, she even sold me a man-bag to hold my Iphone, Ipad and keys. I can only imagine the sad day might come when a chain pharmacy might swallow her up as well, or she may go on to do something else. Then we will join the rest of a disconnected America and become one of those people Bridget remembers – we will get our pills but nobody will know who we are or say hello to us by name or know what it is that we really need.
Welcome back, Bridget.