When you you're part of the community, you're more likely to treat people better. Not only because it's good for business - the reputation around town and all that - but because you know these people. Conversely, it's so much easier to sign off on deceptive, exploitative policies when you've never met the victims, and never will. Real-life relationships make a huge difference.
My favorite recent example is the success story from West Virginia, which by some measures ran a more effective vaccine rollout than any other state. What was West Virginia's secret?
• From the New Yorker (March 5, emphasis mine): "In West Virginia, the vaccine was initially distributed by independent community pharmacists rather than through CVS or Walgreens. This
effort owes its success, in part, to the pharmacists' accessibility but also to their deeper personal relationships in their communities."
• From the New York Times (January 25): "The federal plan teamed up with Walgreens... but many communities in West Virginia are far from the nearest big box store, and
about half of pharmacies are independently owned. ... As a result, West Virginia finished its first round of vaccinations at nursing homes last month, while many states were just getting started." (Related: How Chaos at Chain Pharmacies Is Putting Patients at Risk from the NYT, January 2020.)
• From Matt Stoller (January 27): "Illinois, where Walgreens has its headquarters, is 11th slowest in the country in terms of vaccine roll-out. Rhode Island, where that wonderful consumer-based CVS is based, is one of
the very worst, in the bottom five. ... CVS and Walgreens aren't really even chain drug stores at heart, they are financial institutions set up to gain market power in the drug store market."
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INC. Your Post-Pandemic Life Should Follow the '89 Percent Energy Rule.'
We're not out of the woods yet when it comes to the coronavirus. But with America's vaccination campaign ramping up, cracks of light are starting to show through the trees. And as we get our first glimpse of
the sunlit uplands at the end of a long, hard journey, many of us (myself very much included) have a single thought in mind: One humongous party of everything we've been missing.
But before those of us lucky enough to come out of the pandemic relatively unscathed start planning jam-packed schedules, some smart commentators have a warning about the understandable urge to launch the
Roaring Twenties 2.0.
