What I learned from obsessively hanging out in drug stores


It’s hard to walk out of an American drugstore without feeling like you’re gonna live longer, sleep better, and have more sex.

Earlier this year I became, for a week or so, obsessed with drug stores. If I had time to kill, I went to the drug store. If I passed one on the street, I had to stop inside. I made notes on everything they stocked, compared CVS vs. Wallgreens, and Duane Reade vs. other Duane Reades. The shelves of one chain vs. another were remarkably similar. The shelves of one franchise vs. another were nearly identical.

Drug stores fascinate me for their optimism. These places, I realized, are not built for the sick; they are built for the soon-to-be-healthy. They are bright, they are cheerful. Inside a drug store there is no sickness. There are only cures.

Spend some time browsing in a drug store when you are not sick, and you will learn of afflictions you never knew existed, but you will not fear them because the cures are already before you. We go to drug stores in our time of need, seeking the most American of remedies: spending a little money to feel better.

Here’s a concept that is obvious enough, but worth considering: the type and quantity of remedies we find in drug stores are a direct reaction to the type and quantity of afflictions that we, the people, believe ourselves to have. Study what cures us in the drugstore, and we learn what our collective problems are.

Here’s what I found on the shelves of my neighborhood drugstore:

There were 38 unique sleep aids. And I’m not talking about one box with 12 pills and another with 24. I’m talking about 38 unique products and variations from multiple manufacturers. And that’s not even counting the various pain relievers that sold “PM” or “Nighttime” editions. This was 38 unique sleep aids, plus another 10 kinds of ear plugs, and seven packages of nasal strips with pictures of sleeping people on them.

Relaxation Shots and Snoozeberry Dream Water

My favorite product in the store was the sleep-aid “relaxation shots” that came in 2.5 oz. bottles, akin to 5-Hour Energy shots. You could buy them as singles or packs of four. One brand, of the many, was called Dream Water. The label said the flavor was “Snoozeberry.”

There were 44 different kinds of condoms, plus 16 varieties of lube, two vibrators, and one cock ring.

I could have purchased 79 different toothbrushes, and 98 kinds of toothpaste.

Men, apparently, smell worse than women, because the drug store sold 120 varieties of men’s deodorant, and only 91 for women. There were another 19 non-gendered deodorants for a total of 230 deodorants and anti-antiperspirants. Do we really smell that bad? Obviously, the answer is yes.

There were 14 options for adult diapers, and to my great surprise, only 22 choices for children’s diapers, which tells us a few things. One, babies don’t do the shopping; and two, as much as parents love to dote upon their children financially, when we go to the drug store, we go for ourselves.

The drugstore is a surprisingly personal place, where we reveal our most intimate need and fragility to strangers, depending on what aisle we linger in. Although no customer or employee thought it odd that I was spending so much time in these stores (we’re talking hours here), I still found myself rehearsing explanations for why I spent so long studying the “feminine” aisle, and why I was taking notes on the more-than 70 kinds of tampons and menstrual pads—including organic options, “fresh balance sport” packs, and ultra-thin tampons roughly the size of cigarettes.

In the face wash aisle there were 35 products with the word “acne” on the label—and that’s not counting the word “blemish” or “wrinkle.” The vocabulary used on weight-loss pills and supplements was the most varied in the store. I counted 23 products containing words like weight loss, diet, diet suppressant, and appetite control. Only one product in the whole lot used the F-word: fat burner.

There were 209 remedies for the common cold. Among the treatments for cough, cold, sinus, and flu, there were vapor rubs, lozenges, pills, capsules, gel-caps, liquids, and nasal sprays. And that 209 is not even counting humidifiers, muscle rubs, tissues, vitamins or herbal supplements.

Touring a drug store as a healthy person is almost enough to make you wish you would get sick. The drug store gives us reason not to fear illness, but to embrace it. Sickness is inevitable, but the $20 you spend gives you control over the way you feel.

Of course, a drug store offers not one remedy for our single greatest malady: mortality. It offers no solution to cope with or prevent death—no urns or headstones or fountains of youth. To do so would corrupt the message of hope and healing that drug stores offer, because no matter how much money we fork over, we’re all going to die.

But if drug stores ever do begin to carry remedies for death, I’m quite sure they’ll come packaged in 2.5 oz. bottles, in single shots or packs of four. And I already know what flavor I’ll choose: Snoozeberry.