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| - Welcome to Fortress CVS, where the original design turned its back on the major Central and McDowell intersection (and light rail stop), and then the homeless problem became so severe that management blocked one set of doors with a wall of bottled water cases.
I once had a chat with an assistant manager who explained that it wasn't my fault I couldn't find toilet paper because their planogram made no sense but that's what corporate sent them.
Recently, this CVS (and presumably others) has seen its identity fragment. It wants to be a Target, with its own house brands (Walgreens does this, too). It wants to be a dollar store and thus has some shelves of $1 housewares and $1 food. (Why did I buy a jar of Fuji apples?) It wants to be a convenience store, so it carries all sorts of personal-size snack foods, including the holy grail of candied pecans (but its non-holiday-bagged candy section is weak-to-non-existent, unlike the Walgreens up at Osborn). it sells neckties, should you have a meeting that requires one. It sells almond cookies with Chinese-language packaging, presumably for the Chinese New Year. It sells Whitman Sampler boxes the size of a modest coffee table; and I now know that the mixed hard candies that used to be Pick-a-Mix from Brach's are now called "hostess mix." It also sells lucky bamboo.
In short, it's gone from being a fairly normal drugstore to being a phenomenon.
It's still not really as good as the super-hipster Osborn/Central Walgreen's, but if I'm taking the tram back from the library and need cat litter, it saves me a stop and provides massive entertainment value.
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