Rev. Al Sharpton
National Action Network
Dear Rev. Sharpton:
Your organization, the National Action Network, e-mailed me to boast about your complaint to Walgreen’s CEO regarding his company’s alleged ‘underserving’ of minorities.
I like your tactic! But it prompts me to ask: Why are you ‘underserving’ minorities in need of low-priced pharmaceutical products?
What have you done to attract private capital to finance retail outlets? How have you helped to organize supply chains that get pharmaceuticals from factories to consumers at costs that make the on-going retail distribution of these products profitable at prices that also are affordable to low-income consumers? Where’s the evidence of your entrepreneurial creativity – and the evidence of you risking your own money and of you spending untold hours of your own time – to help bring pharmaceuticals to low-income neighborhoods? Why do you not devote more of your ample energies to struggle with details of the likes of inventory management, optimal liability-insurance coverage, and OSHA work-place-safety regulations so that you can create a retail pharmaceutical chain that earns sufficient profit to enable it to stay afloat while it simultaneously achieves all of what you somehow divine such a retail chain ‘should’ achieve?
Walgreen’s investors and employees actually and already contribute infinitely more energy and resources than you do to the process of making pharmaceutical products readily available to the masses. So surely if it’s appropriate – as you clearly believe it to be – to fling accusations at anyone who arguably exerts insufficient effort to improve the retail distribution of pharmaceutical products, you deserve far more criticism than does Walgreen’s and its CEO.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
