Sicko!, a follow-up

Feeling much, much better today, which reminded me that I never blogged about my previous experiences in French pharmacies.

Pharmacies here aren't like drugstores in the U.S., with long aisles of shelves and a little desk in the back. The only things you can get for yourself are a few beauty aids. Everything else is behind the counter, even things like aspirin, which you can get without a prescription but the pharmacist has to hand it to you, so I guess "over the counter" really is over the counter here. (Except when it isn't -- at least one common OTC medicine in the U.S., hydrocortisone cream, is by prescription only here.)

This seems to be mainly an extreme expression of a trend in French retail toward employing service people rather than allowing customers to serve themselves. Many fruit and vegetable markets don't let you pick your own produce, but rather force you to order it from a clerk.

Coupled with the strict employment laws and regulation of prices, it probably makes it much different, and possibly harder, to run a store here than it is back home.