Has anyone else noticed that smaller, family owned neighborhood grocery stores have been replaced by drug stores? Now, instead of going in to buy fresh vegetables, fruits, meat and poultry, the makings of a healthy meal, we have drug stores mainly selling prescription drugs. In our area we have an ad currently airing on broadcast TV (and maybe cable as well) about a guy who can only dream about eating tacos unless he takes a prescription pill every day. I guess that’s the answer to all of our problems, take a pill. It seems like common sense that if your body is telling you not to the eat tacos, you listen. Not anymore. Go to the doctor and get a prescription for heartburn, and while you’re there, you can get prescriptions for all kinds of things. Things that would’ve never even been mentioned within hearing of anyone who’s not been married for a while, now are advertised for even the kids to hear. Every single one of them has precautions at the end, and some of them quite serious. I always wonder, do people actually take these drugs after hearing these ads? ‘Ask your doctor about….’ Very strange. I thought it was supposed to be the other way around, the doctor tells you what drugs will help you, not the drug companies drumming up business for their products.

I miss those corner grocery stores. One that closed long ago was run by a Sicilian family. It was small, you could go from one end to the other in a couple of minutes, and there weren’t ten thousand items to choose from. You could walk down, pick up whatever looked good for dinner, go home, cook and have a good meal within an hour. Now it’s a drive and the stores are huge, the lines are long, it’s an endeavor. But we seem to prefer our drugs over taking care of ourselves. No exercise, stress, fast food and pills are the order of the day.