Right there in the article.
There's nothing special in a pharmacy. It's a cookie-cutter business.
Build something truly new and innovative, don't try to compete for profit shavings and established markets unless you have 5 aces up your sleeve (like, drone delivery of prescription or something)
Ditto cancer. Ditto orthopedics. Ditto MS and musculoskeletal problems. Ditto pediatrics. Communities exist around all of these things because people need a place to find that information and get their questions answered. Why couldn't that place be the exact type of business that exists to address people's health needs?
It could be a business built around serving the needs of a minority (yet significant) population exceptionally well, instead of being a bland cookie-cutter store that serves everyone pretty much okay, unless something goes wrong and the 22 year old pharmacy tech who has never even had a conversation with someone with your particular health concern remarkably doesn't know how to help you.
But you have 'regular' grocery stores in NY and also the small ethnic product ones.
As a different narrative, I don't see drug-store chains as a sign of communities dying, I see it as a sign of communities getting bigger. In a big city, there are lots of different chains, and in the small city that might have one drug store, they have a chain drug store and the community can focus on other things. Having a "local drug store" doesn't make a community. And having people raise millions of dollars for new episodes of a TV show from the 90s (MST3K) doesn't do anything for local communities.
The only point you offer that relates to your actual argument is the author of the article is the CEO of kickstarter, so his promotion of less monolithic industries is ultimately self serving given that he profits off them - which is an interesting one but I'd contest that with the history and focus of kickstarter and their lack of employing any monopoly strategy.
By limiting entries to simple projects, not allowing anything purely political / fundraising driven, Kickstarter allowed for a vast sea of other crowdfunding sites to exist without ever threatening to take them or their market share over, despite Kickstarter being the site that popularized the crowfunding concept. The opposite of say, Uber's domination strategy, or a lot of other companies for that matter.
So... if I trust any company to express themselves without being self serving, it would be Kickstarter, for the reason that they had an opportunity to be the only major crowdfunding site, and chose not to based on what the founders wanted the company to be about.
* There are only 250 Duane Reade's total (according to Wikipedia), there can't possibly be 400 in Manhattan.
* Duane Reade as a chain is intricately associated with the city of New York, at least from the point of view of a San Franciscan. It is the local culture.
* What's wrong with not having to walk a mile to go to a drug store? Having more locations helps build smaller neighborhoods.
Nobody grows up wanting to own and operate their own drug store anymore. So chains do it instead.
And I don't see how this is different than 50 people opening their own boutiques and destroying neighborhoods through gentrification. But I'm guessing the author would have a different opinion on that.
also: this is the CEO of kickstarter? Isn't it slightly self-serving for him to say "people should be trying their own crazy things that they could never get money for before kickstarter"?