Just what we needed?

Check out this story, from the Boston Phoenix website, about a group calling itself Cure CVS and its claims against the nation's largest drug store chain.

Really? Wow, I had never heard of CVS before I moved to Mass.

For more than two hours, in hearing room A-1, speakers who have banded together under the name "Cure CVS" blasted the nation's largest drug-store chain for ripping off shoppers.

Hearing room A-1, I assume, is somewhere in the State House.

The activists — who have demonstrated their determination by commissioning embroidered CURE CVS windbreakers — brought damaging findings. According to the Massachusetts Office of Consumer Affairs and Business, between 2007 and 2008, CVS paid nearly $350,000 in fines for pricing-accuracy violations — more than 20 percent of the total for all Massachusetts retailers.

I have noticed a couple of times I have not been charged the advertised sale price for an item, but one of the times the cashier caught it. I'm guessing the registers don't automatically ring up the sale price without some input from the cashier.

In correspondence with the Phoenix, and in a recent press statement, CVS spokesman Michael DeAngelis denies malicious intent on his company's behalf. As for the prevalence of fines and expired items found on shelves, he chalks those up to inevitable human-workplace error, and accuses CtW of being a veiled union-organization effort.

Change to Win, or CtW, according to the piece, is delegates representing various of the more than one hundred groups that comprise the consumer-advocacy federation. They have adopted the name Cure CVS ... or something. Not sure why they need 2 names.

I shop at CVS because it's the closest drugstore to my home. But maybe I'll switch to Lynch Dan L (is that really its name?) on High St.

Now that I think about it, it is strange there is no drugstore right downtown - on Water/Merrimac, State or Pleasant streets.

For those of you who don't live here, our CVS is expanding into a mega-store - and in the process, many small businesses that serve the immediate area are being forced out. These would be a video rental place (already re-located on the other side of town), a White Hen Pantry and a dry cleaner.

When I first moved here, I thought Panda was a Chinese food joint, not a dry cleaning place.

I miss the little dry cleaning store on Beacon Hill (a mom & pop). And the convenience store on the corner (ditto). And the little hole-in-the-wall Italian place down the way from the store (double ditto).

Why is there no drugstore downtown?