Imagine if you wanted to buy all your groceries for the week, and had to order them and pay for them one at a time from the grocery store at separate vending ma

Imagine if you wanted to buy all your groceries for the week, and had to order them and pay for them one at a time from the grocery store at separate vending machines. Now remember that, in theory at least, basically everything in the pharmacy that is not behind the counter is more or less the equivalent of the candy by the register in grocery stores, for pharmacies - something they hope you'll go "oh, yeah, I could use that" and buy. ...of course, given that most of the pharmacies I've been to have started locking 90% of their stuff behind "call an associate" barriers anyway, vending machines would probably be a better-scaling model, but that becomes a little awkward because you can't easily mix "things you must go pay at the register for" and "things you bought from the machine", and I think in the limit case you wind up with something like Amazon's experiments in checkoutless groceries to make this work, or a store that's just rows of vending machines and then the pharmacy at the back.