A good soda fountain certainly brought people into the store. Booths and tables and the counter where one could sip a coke or have a malted milk shake and learn the latest gossip. A 'drug store' in the U. S. and Canada also sold more than pharmaceutical drugs. Magazines, papers, the latest hit recordings, cosmetics, etc.- I can't remember it all. Teen-agers hung out at the fountain, which also had sandwiches, doughnuts, etc. And coffee and tea. And you could browse records and magazines.
The soda fountain has disappeared, but many have almost become general stores. Here in Alberta, London Drugs (one big chain), sells computers, TV's, cell phones and Blackberries and cameras and photographic equipment (and has state of the art processing equipment), snacks and some groceries (I get my Scotch marmalade there), all sorts of what used to be called notions, cosmetics, smaller furniture, basic tools, and - you name it, they probably have it.
Oh, yes, they also function as a pharmacy filling prescriptions and selling all those nationally advertized panaceas.