Yay! Now we can browse pregnancy tests on our lunch hour

Last week an absurdly large Walgreens drugstore opened on the site of the former Borders bookshop in Boston’s Downtown Crossing. It has everything you can find at the CVS a couple of doors away (but it’s unlikely to put that hall of horrors out of business), plus stuff like wine and un-American cheese for sad office parties. Boston Globe columnist Paul McMorrow is unimpressed: “The storefront at the corner of Washington and School Streets looks great, but the place stinks of low ambition. If a pharmacy that slings mediocre sushi is a sign of what’s to come from Downtown Crossing’s rebirth, the long-struggling neighborhood is headed down a very bad path.”

McMorrow wishes the space had become anything else (even a “multi-level roller disco”), but the Walgreens fortress is a logical outcome of the shopping district’s shift from what could be called hard retail (books, clothes, appliances) to the soft goods of junk food and skin creams. I wrote about this trend for the Globe in 2011 (“Next Stop, Downtown Noshing”) and tried to take an optimistic view: “The city has always been about the spaces where people can run into each other. So cocktail bars and food trucks will fill the gap left by Filene’s Basement and Tower Records.” Walgreens tests that optimism; miles of too-sugary energy drinks and potato chips do not serve the same function as a corner bar.

If we can’t get that roller-disco, we can hope that a medical-marijuana dispensary will open in the multi-story space that’s been vacant since Barnes and Noble abandoned it in 2006. At least its customers can take advantage of the abundance of junk food in the area.

•A dissenting view from the Boston Business Journal's George Donnelly: "It puts more people to work in the neighborhood. It’s open 24 hours. It’s a positive step forward, although not a huge one."