Duane Reade. There are few things more New York than those two words strung together. They seem ubiquitous, and yet there are times when you somehow find yourself closer to a non Duane Reade pharmacy than a Duane Reade pharmacy. How could this be? And how common is this unreal situation? Luckily for us, a bit of data can solve this mystery.

But before turning to the numbers, I’ll admit that its refreshing to see non-chain pharmacies surviving (and in some cases thriving) across the city. Nevertheless, most New Yorkers end up using one of the four biggest chains in the city: CVS, Duane Reade, Rite Aid or Walgreens. And for that reason, today’s post focuses on those four pharmacy giants.

So how does one decide what pharmacy to use? Chances are, it is not ardent brand loyalty. More often than not, most people choose the closest pharmacy to their home. As New Yorkers, we walk everywhere, so proximity often becomes everything.

In light of these proximity effects, the success of a NYC pharmacy is based heavily on strategically locating the store. In the maps that follow, I color coded every single lot in NYC to match which of the four major pharmacy chains is closest.

To get us started, here is a map of the Southern half of Manhattan, with parts of Brooklyn and Queens:

Southern Manhattan

The map shows what New Yorkers already know: that Duane Reade dominates Manhattan. But there is some territory left for the other three there. Presumably they moved into some of those locations along the water strategically since Duane Reads are concentrated more in the center of the island.

Zooming out a bit we get a better sense of Duane Reade’s prominence in most of Manhattan:

Manhattan/Queens

However, once we leave Manhattan, the story changes quite drastically. The Bronx seems to be dominated by Rite Aid.

The Bronx

Brooklyn and Queens don’t seem to have any particular winner. They are what I would call a patchwork of pharmacy turf.

Queens

Brooklyn

Staten Island is the only borough where CVS seems to dominate and where Walgreens has a significant market share.

Staten Island:

And zooming out we can see the entire city:

NYC:

Lastly, if we take the total number of lots in each Borough, and count how many are closest to each pharmacy, we can get a very rough measurement of the dominance of each brand in each borough:

Market Share per Borough, by Lot

The measure is crude because it gives equal weight to all lots, regardless of the number of people residing on them. So it is not a measure of the number of people closest to each pharmacy. And of course lots in Manhattan are much denser. Even so, the overall winner by this lot counting metric? Rite Aid! Who knew? This apparently made Walgreens pretty jealous, and so they went ahead and bought Duane Reade. The table above shows why this decision made a ton of sense.

So I guess Duane Reade is not the most New York thing after all. It is just the most Manhattan thing. And there is no telling what the future will hold, but one thing is for sure: it will involve more pharmacies.

Data used in this post:

PLUTO

Google Places API



Tools used:

QGIS, Excel

(Note that Google Places API will have some noise in it, so there may be some errors in the map.)