Goodbye to Dunedin's bookstore - is your friendly neighbourhood pharmacy next?
I grew up on Great King Street. Which meant the University Book Shop wasn't a shop to me, growing up - it was a second lounge. I'd wander in after school, plonk myself down on those cushions, and just flick. Asterix and Tintin first (Obelix remains, to this day, a role model). Then later, when I was old enough to sit with something a bit meatier, the Chronicles of Narnia. Nobody hurried you along. Nobody cared if you left with nothing. You were just allowed to be there, surrounded by books, for as long as you liked.
So when I read that UBS is shutting its Great King Street doors after more than 80 years - shifting to a smaller, textbook-only site up on campus - it hit like an absolute gut punch. Eighty years. Janet Frame browsed those shelves. James K. Baxter too. And now it's gone, another line in the long, quiet ledger of things Dunedin used to have.
I read a great line recently, from a book about the world's best shops. "A shop, kiosk or market stall is so much more than a place to buy and sell. It's a statement of what you stand for and what kind of world you want to live in."
That's it exactly. UBS wasn't just selling books. It was a place to meet, to browse, to stumble on something you didn't know you needed. No algorithm ever put Asterix in a seven-year-old's hands the way that shop did. That's not something Amazon can replicate, no matter how fast the delivery.
I'd be lying if I said I didn't see the same pattern coming for my own industry. Pharmacy in this country is being swallowed, chain by chain. Owner-operated pharmacies - the ones where the person behind the counter actually lives in your suburb, knows your name, remembers your nana’s dodgy hip - are getting rarer every year. Everywhere starts to feel the same. Same shelves, same script, same AI generated-blah.
Here's the bit I'm genuinely proud of, though: despite all that, Roslyn Pharmacy hasn't shrunk. We've grown. We've added more services, made it easier to access your pharmacist, and invested in more staff to help you — not because it meets some KPI on a spreadsheet, but because you get better service when there are actually enough people there to look after you.
We've risen to the challenge. But this only happens because Dunedin people continue to choose us. And I don't take that for granted.
That's the whole point, really. Local businesses don't survive on nostalgia. They survive because people choose them, on purpose, again and again. UBS didn't lose to a better bookshop. It lost to convenience, to a thousand small decisions to click "buy" instead of walk in.
So here's my ask, this Saturday: think about where your last ten purchases came from. Then think about what Dunedin loses, quietly, every time the answer is "somewhere else." Nobody thinks their bookshop will disappear. Nobody thinks their pharmacy is next - until it is.
RIP Great King Street UBS. Thanks for the magic - and the cushions.
If anything we’ve written above has piqued your interest, reach out! - we love hearing from you!
Till next month
Andy and the team at Roslyn Pharmacy - Dunedins Friendliest Pharmacy