The Pharmacist and the Walk

A pharmacist in a small coastal town in Maine knew her community the way only someone embedded in it could. She knew who could afford their prescriptions and who could not. She discounted for some. Sold at cost for others. Her identity was measured through hard work and relationship, not possessions.

She was a capitalist worth remembering.

I have been thinking about her a great deal. About what capitalism looked like when practiced at the scale of a community, when the person making the decision knew the person on the other side of the counter, when accountability ran directly between the transaction and the consequence.

That is not nostalgia. It is a question about whether it can work again, in present-day form.

It started with a walk. Not in a boardroom. On a July 4th in Acadia National Park, in the kind of silence that asks questions you cannot unhear. That walk crystallized a question I had been carrying for a long time. About who capitalism serves. About what it was supposed to be and what it has become.

The distance between that pharmacist and the current practice of capitalism is the distance between a Maine coastal town and Davos. One is a place where people know each other and the consequence of a decision is immediate and real.

I know which one I find more interesting.