Boston’s Metropolis Council took Walgreens to process this week for closing three shops in primarily non-white, working-class neighborhoods, according to local TV station WCVB.
“For too lengthy, company companies have handled Black, brown and working-class communities basically as if we’re second-class residents,” councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson stated in an announcement, per the outlet.
This week, Walgreens introduced it will shut three pharmacies in Boston neighborhoods Hyde Park, Nubian Sq., and Mattapan. It’s going to go away individuals in these areas in a “pharmacy desert,” NBC Boston wrote.
It’s doubtless a part of an ongoing technique by Walgreens and competitor CVS to shutter retail places, whilst each chains get additional into offering medical care. In November 2021, CVS introduced it will shut down 900 shops over a three-year period due to shifting client spending habits.
In 2019, Walgreens introduced it will close some 200 shops. Financial headwinds this 12 months might even have sped up some such plans.
Nevertheless it nonetheless leaves individuals who want prescriptions within the lurch. “There’s not one domestically to the place I reside so it will imply going throughout city to Quincy,” Kiera Mahoney of Mattapan informed NBC Boston.
“Within the Black neighborhood, they’re simply closing every part. A few of us [don’t] have transportation, a few of us need to search for transportation now, particularly the aged, and I’m aged,” Ernell Trench, a senior dwelling within the neighborhood, informed WCVB.
The pharmacies have been closed in areas which might be “overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic communities,” in line with The Boston Globe.
Walgreens didn’t reply instantly to a request for remark however stated in an announcement to WCVB that wishes to create “the proper community of shops in the proper places.”
“When confronted with the tough process of closing a selected location, a number of elements are taken under consideration, together with issues just like the dynamics of the native market and adjustments within the shopping for habits of our sufferers and clients, for instance,” the corporate added.
The Boston council handed a (non-binding) decision that requested Walgreens to not open any extra shops within the space until it delayed closing these three places.
“What is going on right here appears to be a present-day manifestation of the embedded financial inequality that we nonetheless undergo from,” Fernandes Anderson additionally stated.
Supply: Entrepreneur