Bodies and Structures

The Space of a Local Drugstore

The drugstore served as a contact zone for the individual interactions among consumers and sales clerks. And this level was, perhaps, the most important. The space of the drugstore, at this individualized level, determines the drug manufacturer's economic viability. It is the primary interface that manufacturers have with the public at-large. It is the crucial contact zone between producers, middlemen, and consumers -- the point at which consumers decide, ultimately to buy a company's products, those of a competitor, or nothing at all. Hoshi configured the space of the drugstore, above all, to ensure that the frequency of contacts between middlemen and consumers lead to transactions.  

Demand needed to be created, and the control and management of the space of the drugstore was essential for these efforts. The creation of demand also hints at another space for control, which was the space of the body. In the words of Thomas Richards regarding patent medicines in Victorian England: "The placebo-drug…transformed the body first into a field for advertised commodities, and later into an entity so dependent on them that it had become one in its own right."

The company attempted to control the spatial configuration of the drugstore both outside and inside.

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