The Last Counter by William Liu

A pharmacy is the most-used piece of medical infrastructure in most American towns, and the least discussed. About eight thousand of them have gone since 2018. More than two thousand closed in 2025 alone.

The closures have also changed character. Chain pharmacies were a quarter of all closures in 2021 and nearly two-thirds by 2025, which means the story is no longer independents being squeezed out by chains. It is chains closing stores they already won.

The consequence is not evenly distributed. Forty-eight point four million Americans now lack convenient access to a pharmacy, up from forty-one point two million in 2021. Fifty-six point eight percent of rural residents live in a pharmacy desert. A third of rural Medicare Part D enrollees live in a zip code with no pharmacy at all. And when a rural pharmacy closes, fifty-four percent of its patients are displaced rather than absorbed, against seventeen percent in a city.

The Last Counter asks what that counter actually did. Not the dispensing, which can be mailed, but the part that cannot: the person who saw every prescription a patient filled regardless of which doctor wrote it, who caught the interaction, who noticed the refill that never got picked up, who was open on Sunday.

This is not a villain story about chains or benefit managers. The closures follow from reimbursement arithmetic that is mostly public and mostly boring, and a villain frame makes the mechanism harder to see. Drawing on retail pharmacy market analysis, national access research, and published data on drug benefit concentration, this book follows the economics down to a single counter in a single town, and asks what a place loses when it goes.