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Letters to the Editor
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Boots the Chemists
Flabbergasted!
From Mr R. Emrys Jones, MRPharmS
I was flabbergasted when I read of Boots the Chemists’s future
trading policies. After having failed miserably with optics and dentistry
they are now going to sell alcoholic drinks.
The righteous, alcohol-abstaining founder of Boots, who had a strong
voice in temperance, must be turning in his grave to see his previous
business being used for such things. There were restrictions in his leases
that forbid alcoholic drinks to be sold from his premises.
When I was looking, after qualifying in pharmacy in the early 1950s,
for a shop where I would not be treading on anyone’s toes, I saw
an advertisement for a pharmacy for sale in New Tredegar, South Wales
Valleys. The shop had been sold that week to Boots when I went to view
it. As it happened I knew the locum pharmacist and went through to the
dispensary to talk to him. The shop had a licence to sell wines. The
stocktakers were taking stock and they had strict instructions from Boots
head office to pour all the drinks down the drain, and I witnessed them
doing this. They were told the wines could not be given away or sold
to anyone. We seem to have come full circle in half a century and I wonder
what happened to the building leases restrictions.
Robert Emrys Jones
Sully, Vale of Glamorgan
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The
Pharmaceutical Journal