Business
Creating community at a drugstore
By Maurice Brown
As a stranger tore past the pharmacy’s shelves, she insisted that the staff behind the front counter answer one question: “Who here is Thomas?”
“Oh, *^!$,” Thomas James thought as he braced for a scolding. But seconds later, he saw the woman’s eyes begin to pool with tears as she made her next ask: whether she could hug him.
“You helped my son so much,” she said. “You gave my son a reason to live. He was not doing good at all.”
Thomas James, who customers just call Thomas, is the founder and supervising pharmacist of Strides Pharmacy at Amsterdam Avenue and West 149th Street in Harlem. That mother’s son was a longtime diabetic, whose body, James said, had dwindled to “skin and bone.”
“I just remember seeing him sitting there in the waiting area,” James said, pointing to two empty chairs by the window near the store’s entrance, past rows of prescription bottles and Kleenexes. “He just looked like he was just so done with health care professionals.”
James told the young man how to improve his health, explaining new medicines for him “the best that I could,” he said. James recommended a free diabetes education clinic to his customer.
“I saw him today,” James said, one year after he first met that diabetic patient. “He gained weight. It looks like he’s doing great.”
James’ store welcomed many other folks of the community, too, including one recent evening after the business was officially closed for the day. Keys jingling in his hand, James unlocked the door for a delivery driver passing through on his usual route. He needed to use the store’s bathroom.
Before the driver came, a little girl named Maya pounded on the locked door, grinning as she waved at James frantically. He waved and smiled back. “She always comes in… Tries to get some candy.”
Before starting his business, James worked for a 24-hour CVS pharmacy. Five years there left him unfulfilled. “I wanted to help people,” he said.
But his long hours and what he described as the chains’ demanding metrics-first policies made his goal difficult. CVS measured how quickly workers answered calls. That incentivized workers, James said, to “pick up the phone and then put it back on hold. And then, you’re on hold for 30 minutes,”
Long shifts and seemingly endless tasks had him working “like a dog,” he said. When CVS removed counter stools where workers could sit and rest their feet, James decided it was time to leave.
After opening his pharmacy two years ago, he worked to get the neighborhood to open itself to him. James learned his customers’ names and their medications by heart. He asked how their day had treated them. “Everybody has a name. Everybody has a story,” said the pharmacist.
Black mold inside Julius Jones’ apartment made him seriously sick, said the 56-year-old chef who lives one block away from James’ store. Jones said he had two scarred lungs and stage three kidney disease. He suffered from shortness of breath. His resting heart rate was 20 beats per minute. For a man his age, it should have been 60 to 100 beats per minute.
That health scare took Jones to James’ counter about a year ago. “I never took medicine a day in my life,” Jones said, before asking James to fill a prescription and explain how it worked.
About 18 months after first meeting James, Jones said he was “healthy as an ox,” eating well and knowing “how to live my life now.” The pharmacist, Jones said, “guided me through a forest.”
“I couldn’t do it without him,” Jones said. “I’m not afraid long as he’s around.”
Mohammed Siddique, a customer of James’ store for about 10 months, said he cherished the whole staff’s effort to get to know him. “They were like the friendliest and the most welcoming staff I’ve ever met.”
For him, the 1,000-square-foot drug store has provided more than just medication. “It’s more like a community,” said Siddique, who is prescribed psychiatric medication.
Conversations at the pharmacy helped him like no other place did, he said. “I’ll vent my whole life off,” he said. “They don’t charge me for therapy, but it happens.”