Christian Conservative Pharmacy Closes Due to Lack of Customers

Sounds like they got what they deserved… Good for them and for us in so many ways.

Aw, man. I already laughed.

Like Ellie, I also require hormones for non birth-control reasons. I recently switched from pills to a Mirena IUD, though, so I guess a holy pharmacy doesn’t have a say in that.

Oh, we can still laugh.

I laughed at the creepy idea of what kind of community they thought they lived in. They must have thought that people would ‘flock’ to their righteous pharmacy. Regardless of how many fundamentalists were around, ‘flocking’ turned out to be too much of a bother.

They thought they had a lot of dedicated friends in their community, but got left high and dry. I’ll admit that’s kind of a cruel thing to laugh at. It’s still funny.

Well, count me as not at all sad about this, but I will say in their favor that they did the right thing in accordance to their principles. I’m perfectly fine with them offering a privately funded option that is in line with their beliefs (as ridiculous as I find the beliefs themselves). Fine by me, even though it turns out that a lot more people are willing to pay lip service to those beliefs than willing to actually live by them, or at least there aren’t enough true believers for a customer base.

Better that than the fundies who decide that they’re going to work at a normal pharmacy and then berate or refuse shy teenagers condoms or desperate women. Like a vegetarian refusing to make you a steak at grill.

Things worked exactly how they were supposed to work. The business made a bad decision and the market punished them. This result would have been guaranteed under a free market. We don’t have a free market, so really we got lucky this time around.

Lindsay has it completely backward, though. A law requiring pharmacies to have good business sense wouldn’t work at all. Take the alleged communities with only a faith-limited pharmacy. As the recent news with the Catholic charities in DC, etc. shows, if you pass a law requiring that pharmacy to stock things that the owner doesn’t want to stock, chances are you end up with zero pharmacies in that area. The solution is to remove the regulations that are stopping other pharmacies from opening in that area (note that such regulations, like all regulations, are really just a way of maintaining the current oligarchical business model and have nothing to do with patient health, worker safety, etc., no matter what their name suggests). Once competing pharmacies open, the bad one will go out of business and everyone rejoices.

Sad to see a local business close their doors, but they obviously picked their religious beliefs over the needs of their customers. That’s their choice. And the customers exercised their choice by going elsewhere.

Like Ellie, I have a condition that requires one of the items they were refusing to sell. I need porn.
Seriously, do these people not realize that refusing to sell condoms and birth control pills will predictably increase the need for abortions?
Are they really too stupid to put two and two together? I know. Stupid question.

As implied by a couple of earlier posts, birth control pills are NOT just prescribed for contraception. My wife’s endometriosis got so bad before her hysterectomy that her doctor was afraid she would literally “bleed out” and die if she continued having a period. To protect her life she had to chemically stop her period altogether until she could have surgery. A pharmacist who can’t dispense legally prescribed drugs should consider a career change.

I am not at all sad this place closed down.
But that pharmacy is a private health care provider, not a publicly funded one. If they choose not to sell these products- well, sucks to be them when people go elsewhere. However, it doesn’t set a dangerous precedent when they ‘pick and choose among the services they provide.’ It sets a dangerous precedent to expect private companies to conform to outside orders.
Plus, in an age of mail order pharmacy, most of these rural areas have an option- and from spending time in just such an area, I know mail order is always FTW.

In my city there is a Christian dry cleaners called, wait for it, ‘Christian Dry Cleaners’. I’m not sure why I should care if they’re Christian or not. Maybe holy water works miracles on stains. It doesn’t matter since I take my business to the local Atheist Complex so I don’t have to mix with any believin’ folk.

Any business that promotes themselves in regards to what they DON’T sell is doomed to failure. If I have a choice between two grocery stores and one of them advertises “Hey! We don’t sell Fritos!” well… I’m going to the place that sells Fritos.

Would Christians or others be interested in a movie theater that bleeped out the profanity and edited out sex scenes? That could be another opportunity for Bruchalski to mix his faith with his business acumen.

Miko (and others) has it correct – let the free market eliminate incorrect business decisions.

This is why I am not very supportive of anti-discrimination for the same reason. You can open a business and proudly discriminate, and if you do I will open a business right next to you and advertise that I don’t. Not only do I have a larger pool of potential customers, I have the moral high road which I might use in advertising (even most Christians don’t like busybody moralists) and finally I am operating to advance my business and doing what it takes to succeed while you are operating to discriminate and success is secondary.

This is why Jim Crow “LAWS” had to be passed to force businesses to discriminate: most business owners like green more than they liked white.

Except that those discriminated against don’t typically have a lot of economic power, and in a racist enough environment, the members of the majority will only patronise the exclusive shop.

You can say that you have the moral high ground, but that’s exactly what the other store will be saying too, and theirs is the view that will agree with those that have the economic power. You can say that you’re putting business first and morality second, but in that kind of environment, discrimination is how business works, and going against that is putting morality ahead of business.

The problem is that you don’t necessarily have the larger pool of customers. You don’t have majority + minority, you have minority + majority who are willing to shop where the minority shops. Whether or not this is larger than the chunk of the majority that is willing to shop at the majority-only shop is not guaranteed.

The invisible hand of the market is not a cure-all by any means.

If g0d wanted them to stay open he would have sent them customers. The fact that they didn’t get customers means that g0d hates them, is testing them or, just maybe, doesn’t exist.

“no porn, no tobacco”

No wonder you guys have conflicts about God. Pharmacies in the UK sell cough sweets and painkillers. Porn and cigs in Boots? It would never happen. You buy porn and cigs in the offy. Try not to mix carnal pleasure with prescription drugs. Always been my rule.

That was good for a laugh.

But overall the situation with these nutcakes who are pharmacists not to distribute drugs but to force god rules on people is not. To leave it to the free market is not really honest and only doable in areas where there is competition. Not in small towns where they’re the only game in town, etc. Not to mention, a thing like pharmacy should be closely regulated since people’s lives are at stake.

No, the “free” market is not the solution. People too religious to fill certain scripts finding a career more suitable to their personality is.