On a recent Monday afternoon, Raul Valdiviezo stood in line with nearly 20 other customers waiting to pick up his medicine at the pharmacy inside the Walgreens at 23rd and Mission.
“I wish I could sit, but if I do, someone may try to take my place, or think that I’m cutting the line,” said Valdiviezo in Spanish. At 82, he finds the waiting times of up to an hour increasingly more difficult.
He’s not alone.
The last Walgreens in the Mission keeps absorbing customers from the many that have closed nearby – the ones at 16th and Mission in 2019, then at Cesar Chavez and Mission in 2021 and finally the Walgreens on Potrero in April. That last closure meant blockbuster lines at 23rd Street and the waits have failed to improve.
Carly Kaplan, from the pharmacy communications department at Walgreens, says they’ve taken steps to cut the wait times. “That includes adding extra registers, providing additional personnel and working extra hours. We are committed to leveraging all available resources to improve the patient experience.”…