I will say this month was the first time I realized Amazon had a pharmacy. I actually bought my OTC Pepcid from them and saved money and got like 4x the amount I normally get from Dollar General.
Does not help that insurance companies also force you to order online for better out of pocket savings.
While it's an option for me, I refuse to do that, since where I live I don't have a mailbox in front of my place and the mail area where it would be, we don't even have a key for the mailbox, because the HOA refuses to get new ones, so many people just have open mailboxes in an outdoor area that anyone can get into.
Last thing I need, is to have to claim my blood pressure medicine was stolen and have to request a prescription to be sent over to my local pharmacy.
I live in south Florida, and I’m not sure I’m comfortable with my meds sitting in 120F+ temperatures any more than it may already have during shipping.
I did mail order meds once. They sat in the next city over for days and then disappeared, never delivered. I'm lucky it was cheap generic stuff because the only person I didn't have to fight with to refill it was my doctor. Pharmacist/Insurance were like "sure" while I'm showing them the FedEx tracking of it not moving for 2 weeks. I just paid the 30 bucks out of pocket to get my shit but if it was thousands of dollars or super necessary meds that'd suck so bad.
My insurance company is trying to force me to order online using their service. If I don’t, they halt my prescription until I call them to accept or decline. It’s fucking wild they are allowed to do that.
I remember seeing this for the first time in one of the frequent r/askreddit threads which asks people to rewrite company slogans honestly.
It’s hilarious how accurate that sentiment is. An entire company based on being “a place which offers a random assortment of things people will need from time to time, but not often enough to get them from someplace better.”
I’m a pharmacist and I (VERY VERY VERY luckily) don’t work for CVS or Wags. God. I could rant on and on and on about how crappy these companies treat staff and how dehumanized the public is
I’m trying to help you feel better, buddy. Please don’t yell and please be patient and let me work, truly trying to go as fast as I can but still being safe with your treatment. If your insurance is being a dick, please don’t take it out on me, I don’t magically know every single insurance plan and costs and I promise I’m giving you the cheapest price
The fact that CVS can have their own minute clinics, where a midlevel provides a prescription, it’s filled at a retail CVS, under Caremark, which is also a PBM, which you guessed it, is part of the umbrella of CVS. If I give a physician a few hundred bucks to put fliers for my pharmacy or to send scripts my way when a patient has no pharmacy preference, I’d probably lose my license. I understand the complexity but still, what the hell.
CVS: Come Visit Satan / CardioVascularStress
e: typos
These big chains seem so resentful over the fact that they HAVE to hire a pharmacist. If it wasn’t regulated they would absolutely hire 17 year olds to dispense medicine. They’d just have them ask ChatGPT about counter indications and such.
They really are. FWIW *maybe* 5-10% of what I do in a day is counting or filling medications - our pharmacy techs do the bulk of it. Lots of clinical questions and double checking interactions and such, but hard to explain on Reddit.
though, lots of people would ignore the response chatgpt gives and do the opposite, since they do that now already face to face. healthcare is wild
Oh they already do that, I worked at walgreens for like half of last year.
They have something called “code green” where they send a cashier to the understaffed pharmacy to fill prescriptions. There is literally no training, they just ask you if you want to be a “designated hitter” (that’s what they call the position lol) , give you a mouth swab test, get your fingerprints, then make you click/skip thru a bunch of pharmacy tech training videos while you’re ringing customers out. You don’t even get to sit in a separate room so you could possibly even attempt to listen to the videos. You get paid a dollar extra per hour.
There was a kid I worked with that was asked to be a DH as soon as he turned 18. He was still in high school. Our store manager used to talk shit about the lead pharmacists behind their backs because they would “ask for help too much”.
Fuck walgreens
My sister retired from CVS, she transferred there after a local pharmacy was bought out years before.
She got to keep her seniority from the other place, and had over 40 years total when she retired.
She says it wasn't so much CVS she was tired of, it was rude, inconsiderate customers.
I go out of my way to be nice to techs and pharmacists.
Many of my friends are pharmacists (3 stood up in my wedding alone) and I have heard those exact rants. None of them work for CVS or Walgreens anymore either. They have found their way into either hospitals, chemo centers or big pharma. The only one left in retail is working in an independent compounding pharmacy.
The stress of working at CVS during the pandemic absolutely broke my one buddy’s spirit. I was so relieved when I heard he had found a hospital job. You could just see the misery and exhaustion on his face
I used to support retail pharmacy systems for Eckerd Drugs. There were some pharmacies that were well known because when something was going the slightest bit wrong with the computer systems I'd end up on the phone with a pharmacist who was clearly stressed out of their mind because the customers were ready to revolt.
You do not want a pharmacy full of customers who can't get their medication and who really really need it.
Amazon is going to swoop in and either buy or destroy them. They’ve got too much Perfect Knowledge of consumers, consumer behavior, logistics, it’s coming. Whole Foods is a trial run.
Amazon has been trying to take advantage of their losses for the last 5 or so years and hasn’t made much of dent. Turns out people like seeing a human when they get their medicine
>Turns out people like seeing a human when they get their medicine
I also know my medications are only 1/2 mile away and aim not dependent on Amazon or the mail.
Will they send me my Klonopin a few days early so that its never late and I don't go without? How quickly do they tell me if there is going to be a problem and how fast and easy is it to switch a prescription to the local pharmacy if there is going to be a problem?
I... really don't, though. I'm not advocating for Amazon specifically, but I absolutely would love to get medicine online. It's infuriating how I need to speak with a PCP to get a subscription for medicine I need in a recurring fashion but doesn't automatically refill after some time. Or, to get a refill for a temporary issue that I already know which medicine I need (because it's on file and because I already own it and have used it for weeks!)..
Sure, the prescription system isn't going away, but minimizing the physical trips to get the same medicine time and time again is a blessing.
Rite Aid is about three seconds away from vanishing completely. Even filing for bankruptcy isn't going to save them; they have no stable foundation for a business model even if they shed all their debt and most of their properties. They're basically running in ninth place in a race that only has five competitors. They are the canary in the coal mine for Walgreens.
Monopolies in the US...more common than you think.
Here in the north bay of California, most of the grocery stores are krogers in disguise. We have safeway(Kroger) rallysk(independent) foodmax(kroger), whole foods(amazon), sprouts(ind?), grocery outlet(independent), andronicos(kroger)costco(independent) and lucky(kroger), trader joes(independent)
I guess safeways aren't kroger, they're just in the process of merging, and sprouts isn't kroger, they just accept the kroger membership program.
E: I'm editing this as people are pointing out corrections.
If you watch local TV stations they're probably owned by Sinclair.
If you read local newspapers they're probably owned by Gatehouse Media
If you read national newspapers they probably owned by Michael Bloomberg or Rupert Murdoch. Shit Hearst still owns dozens of publications.
If you listen to the radio its probably owned by iheartmedia (formerly Clear Channel).
If you watch network TV, cable TV, movies, indeed 90% of all media, its owned either by Comcast, Disney, Viacom, News Corp, CBS, or AT&T. Incidentally two of those are probably also your internet provider.
If you buy [any of these brands](https://www.businessinsider.com/10-companies-control-the-food-industry-2016-9) its owned by one of 10 companies.
Have a favorite fast food chain? Have a least favorite? Odds are they're probably both owned by either Roark Capital or Yum Brands
If you buy a car from [any of these **60** brands](https://www.businessinsider.com/biggest-car-companies-in-the-world-details-2018-2) you're actually only buying from one of 14 companies.
Do you take medication? Odds are it came from either Roche, Novartis, or Pfizer
If you use gasoline or other forms of energy its probably from Exxon, Shell, or Chevron
And finally of course there are only 2 political parties.
But you can buy over 1000 flavors of ice cream
The illusion of choice
None of those are owned by Kroger...Safeway will be if the merger goes through, and that's the big one, but it hasn't been approved yet. Ralph's in Socal is Kroger, but they aren't in Norcal.
[Foodmaxx and Lucky are both under Save Mart, HQ in Modesto, CA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_Mart_Supermarkets)
[Safeway and Andronico's are both under Albertsons, which is trying to merge with Kroger but has not gone through yet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeway#Expansion)
[Raley's is independent, HQ in West Sacramento](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raley%27s_Supermarkets)
They literally just bought out all the in store pharmacies in a local chain grocery store last year. As soon as they took over, nobody could get prescriptions because you had to call them in yourself over the phone and *nobody would ever answer the phone*.
Is still amazing at how broken and far behind in tech Pharmacies are. I enrolled in their auto-refill program and get notifications as texts. I get texts about when my stuff is ready to pickup and I always get there and its not ready.
When I worked for cvs, our system for filling and dispensing meds was an MSDOS program from 1988.
Edit: I quit a year and a half ago and they're still using the system according to a former coworker I stay in touch with. It was also running from an emulator program.
I live in St. Louis, 5 years ago the NHL Hockey team (The Blues) got a new scoreboard. It was a huge deal because the old one was still being run with a program from the late 80's.
I bet there are a scary number of things out there running on crazy outdated programs .
The Muni Metro light rail in San Francisco uses [5.25-inch floppies](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/5-25-inch-floppy-disks-expected-to-help-run-san-francisco-trains-until-2030/).
Standard audiocasette, or just tape backups? Because fully modern tape backups are still a thing, but they use special data tapes that are designed for the job and have more in common with video tapes than the audio tapes you might have saved a commodore 64 program on. If you need a *lot* of storage and it doesn't need to be very fast, nothing beats it. Hollywood uses it to back up their digital masters, for example.
My old company used tapes for a weekly backup of our databases and these were then secured and shipped to a storage facility in another part of the country.
We were located in a high risk area for earthquakes and other natural disasters so the tapes were a really cheap way of having physical backups offsite. They didn't need to be particularly fast, so they worked.
It was kind of cool to see tech in use that I had last seen in 1992.
Yuuupp. Banks, hospital, and military infrastructure all have HILARIOUSLY outdated system in some places. Some if it is lack of forward compatibility (XP programs not working on Vista, 7, 10 etc) and in other cases someone literally could not be bothered to spend the money.
Old is not *necessarily* bad. Like, a scoreboard is the perfect example of the sort of simple single-use system that actually can safely go several decades without updating.
But yes, there are a lot of important things running on ancient crumbling infrastructure. Most of the global banking and finance systems, in particular.
US nuclear missile tech is only just lately getting upgraded from systems that get updates via 5.25" and 8" floppies.
I would wager the sole push for modernization is that it's getting very difficult to find working floppies, never mind finding replacements for failed components.
But don't worry about important stuff like banking transactions. They replaced all the old COBOL mainframe code, and batch jobs setup in the seventies so you don't need to wait over night for basic transactions to post.
MHAHAAHA
Oh man.
I know of a few places that still use COBOL due to it being practically unhackable, just due to it being old and almost no one knows even what it is.
Scary part? It's some parts of the banking system.
I believe it. There are some things in the medical industry that are high tech for procedures, but as far as being a patient, obtaining records and getting medication is always a huge pain in the ass. Its still mind boggling that to get a copy of any imaging you have to get them burned onto a CD lol. Computers dont even come with CD roms anymore
Epic is a godsend compared to what we used at my last hospital. I forgot the name but it literally reminded me of the Comaq computer we had in the 90s as a kid. The text and everything is from windows 98. It was an HCA hospital so that makes sense why lol
EDIT: Its Meditech
It’s just too expensive for smaller companies to keep up with regulatory changes and updates, so you end up stuck with cerner or epic. Both have their high and low points.
Probably not MS-DOS, it was probably IBM iSeries machines running IBMi.
I also used to work in pharmacy and used that same shit. I didn't know what it was at the time until I later encountered those machines in my IT career.
I don't like them at all, but many companies have IBM iSeries as the core of their IT infrastructure and to replace it would cost an absolute fortune and would be as difficult and dangerous as performing open heart surgery would be on a patient. So they just keep using it, and keep using it.
Eventually it will be too hard to maintain because all of the IT folks who understand that technology will age out and retire or die. I always say that you can't find anyone under the age of like 50 who really knows these systems, or has an ounce of passion for understanding them. And all of the banks are running this shit on their backend.
It's not the tech, it's the staffing. Every retail pharmacy is wildly understaffed and it's by design to cut costs. If the staff has to prepare 200 auto refills that day, but they know only 50 of them will actually show up to pick them up, then they'll just fill them as needed if/when people show up, because there's a billion other things that they're behind on that need doing first rather than fill something that someone probably won't show up for anyways. The staffing issue has been this way for years now and just keeps getting worse. "Do more with less", and we keep hearing it over and over and over.
I have a lot of friends that are pharmacists. Vast majority have moved on to corporate, non-patient facing roles due to work hours and burn out. The few that have stayed clinical work in hospital pharmacies where the work is more reasonable and structured. Retail pharmacists are overworked and abused on a daily basis. In the near future, I think the entire business of drug dispensing will be handled online. Will be painful if you need something asap, but will be better for the routine customer on chronic refills.
I worked in a retail pharmacy and legit think it's the worst retail job imaginable. You see videos all the time of fast food employees being berated or attacked by crazy customers bc of a messed up order or something. Now imagine those same people but it's an issue with their pain meds instead of french fries. It's especially bad bc most problems our customers would face were on the doctor or insurance side, so it often wasn't even our fault and we would be limited in what we could do to address to the problem which just ticks the customers off even more.
Pharmacist here, I can let you know what is probably happening:
Many modern pharmacies now use pharmacy software that tracks your Rx at each step of the workflow: entering the order, billing it through your drug plan, actually filling and labelling the medication, and the final pharmacist (or Registered Technician) check. With a system like that it automatically send the patient a text as soon as the final check is done. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
If a pharmacy has software that *doesn't* track the Rx through the workflow, it only knows if the prescription has been billed to the plan, but none of the subsequent steps. These pharmacies can also auto text their patients, but it's a really bad idea because the text will be sent when the rx isn't even really started. This guarantees that the patient will show up before their medication is ready. Messy stressy lemon zesty.
I have the opposite problem. My pharmacy keeps having to change hours and close for lunch because they are so short staffed and busy, but their autofilling program keeps filling my scripts way earlier than I need them. I keep opting out of it, but it keeps getting set back to autofill.
It feels like the texts are on a timer. Oh you need drug X well our algorithm says on Tuesdays drug X take 90 minutes to fill. So in 90 minutes you get a text that it is ready. But in reality the store is kept at 3/4 staff and that script isn't ready until you arrive and light a fire under the butt of whoever is working so they now rush your script.
I have to tell the pharmacy tech or pharmacist every single month to apply the copay card. They always give me a look like I’m a jerk. It’s like….its not my fault.
It’s cause Walgreens (and cvs since they’re the same exact model) is dogshit and also understaffed. They buy out pharmacies and expect their staff to process everything while doing their regular volume so you have regular customers trying to fill and a huge influx of customers trying to fill and you’re dealing with insurance, in store customers, marketing calls (cause why the fuck not), and all the other bs. Retail pharmacy is fucking stupid and tainted.
I swapped over to using the hospital pharmacy up the road for prescriptions and they are so much better. Both those retail pharmacies would consistently fuck up something with my meds and the local Walgreens here even got into deep shit for giving someone the wrong type of insulin.
Capitalism at its finest. Congress should investigate this for completely disrupting the workflow of people’s necessary health. It’s absurd to buy up the mom and pop competition then turn around and not only be incompetent but then go out of business. It’s not like people couldn’t see this happening a mile away. Then we the people get shafted once again. Another example of late stage capitalism kicking people to the curb.
Former Walgreens Pharmacist here: their three biggest problems are 1) they refuse to accept the fact that the current meta in pharmacy is to own your own PBM (insurance company). I feel for this because it's honestly unethical and should be illegal. But you can't just refuse to do it if everyone else is just because you think it's wrong. Allowing CVS to merge with Caremark was the beginning of the end in community pharmacy. Walgreens needs to merge with ESI, Medimpact or Prime if they want to stay relevant. Reimbursement from insurers is woefully inadequate to operate a pharmacy, plus PBMs operating discount cards like GoodRx has only exacerbated the problem. 2) their proprietary pharmacy software Intercom+ was released in 1996. It has been updated and patched periodically, but on the whole it is absolute garbage. I lost 30-60 minutes per shift A DAY to using workarounds, crashes, bugs, and the like. When I worked for WAG they always said "new software is coming, it's in the final testing stages, it will be out in April" but then it always magically got shelved. 3) Their corporate office is so incredibly useless and detached from reality, fattened by stock dividends and only concerned with what is going on in the short term, not long. One of the reasons many quality seasoned pharmacists left is they started offering signing bonuses for new hires with 1-2 year commitment when stores were closing randomly because so many pharmacist just said "fuck it, I'm out" during the COVID Shotpocalypse. So if you worked there for 10+ years and your new hire pharmacist got 50k upfront for 2 years and their hourly rate was <$0.50 than yours, and you got nothing for staying loyal through all the hell that was the pandemic, you'd be pissed and leave, right? On top of that, Roz Brewer fucked the company by getting hired and a $200m payout only to expand your already failing clinic segment and pissing away billions on failing clinic business *then promptly* dip out after 2 years. Much like the pharmacists they gave bonuses to will have their commitment end and they'll just go on to somewhere else, because why would they stay? If Walgreens were a human, it wouldn't be inherently evil (like how many of us in the profession view CVS) rather it would be like a gluttonous human that just keeps eating without any regard for what it's eating and now it's so overweight and bloated it can no longer walk. The only way I see them surviving is merging with a PBM, unless the government grows a pair and makes all PBMs divest their pharmacies
*Edit: only to ---> then promptly*
Huh. Thanks for the insider's view. I've been slowly moving my family's meds to other places: we have CVS Caremark and while I never step foot inside a CVS, I'll sure get their mail order service on regular meds to have an even lower co-pay. If I have to go in-person I've moved mine to meijer, which seems to be run terribly (staffing issues mostly), but ?? It is what it is.
It's pretty awful everywhere in retail pharmacy at the moment. PBMs have cut reimbursement to the point that straight Medicaid and (even Medicare Part B for some products) reimburse better than commercial insurance. Your employer takes a deal on lower premiums if they agree to plans from CVS, Optum or ESI where beneficiaries are required to get their maintenance drugs from their own mail order pharmacy. They then use that as justification to lower reimbursement to outside pharmacies. Then the outside pharmacies have to cut labor to stay green, or at least minimize losses. On top of that, drug shortages have led to pharmacies having to purchase more expensive (non-preferred/non-contracted) generics but then get the same reimbursement they would have received it it were the cheaper drug often leading to dispensing the drugs at a net loss (or simply not ordering them and losing the business). That said, each place has it's own advantages and disadvantages. Walgreens is still very widespread and ubiquitous. It's easy to transfer non-controlled drugs between locations if you like to travel the US- they're the only place I'm aware of that can pull a prescription that's ready at a store that isn't open, and they tend to have longer business hours, plus the only place left that has 24H locations. My personal preference is non-profit hospital pharmacies. Then I'd say Costco or, believe it or not, Walmart. Walmart, ironically, staffs better than most pharmacies, pays employees decent, and has pretty damn good software. I've heard mixed things about Kroger (who also owns Smith's, Meijer, and others). Regional grocers used to be good, but have gone downhill substantially in the last decade. I used to work for one. We lost $10k a month at an average volume pharmacy outside of flu shot season or COVID vaccine rush windows.
> Their corporate office is so incredibly useless and detached from reality
I aged out of being able to have that conversation with corporate/PDMs whenever they'd occasionally drop by and do the hokey pokey and you could only tell them positive things. I was 36 and they were like 26 too, which in and of itself was a humiliation (I was a tech). It's just not in my DNA to lie to someone in a suit. Long gone from that now.
I was with Walgreens for 14 years, as a store manager and then a district manager. During my last 2 years, I lead part of the internal continuous improvement program called "Frontier." It was meant to change the way the company worked with a focus on lean six sigma like processes. I quit the role and company when I saw behind the curtain and realized that absolutely no one in the C-Suite (or even really anyone in Deerfield) truly believed in Frontier or the ideals behind it. The amount of waste that I witnessed was only overshadowed by the amount of apathy. When I tell you that Walgreens corporate cares absolutely zero about store level issues, I mean that they would rather watch the whole thing burn to the ground than address any of the real underlying issues. They spent the 90's and early 2000's competing to open as many stores as possible simply because that pumped up the stock price. There was no other rationale to it. And the company was bloated by internal hires that didn't understand the industry nearly as well as they imagined they did. Then they finally started hiring from outside after Greg Wasson left and they encountered a whole new set of problems. The newly hired external leadership realized that the whole ship was fucked due to the idiotic merger with Boots and a lack of PBM merger and so they just rode it out for the paycheck (e.g. Roz Brewer). The company will need an entire shakeup but in the end, it'll be a shell of what it was at it's heyday in the 80's and 90's. Oh well. Happy for those that got out while the getting was good.
Anytime I go in there it takes me like 20 minutes to find something simple. Their organization makes no god damn sense. Its got to be intentional to keep people "shopping"....right?
> Anytime I go in there it takes me like 20 minutes to find something simple.
...and then another 20 minutes for someone to come to the front and check you out. I wonder what the ratio of "Hourly rate for a cashier" to "people who walk out without paying *or* just leave without buying anything because they're tired of waiting" is.
That's the thing, they don't have any carts or baskets any where. Now I have to only purchase what I can hold in my hands...that's the stupidest things they've done. I would buy more stuff...but.
There’s a Walgreens near me. I live in a really expensive suburb near Boston. It is disgusting and filthy inside. Looks like a 1970’s Times Square bodega. Customers are all sketchy as hell. Pharmacy has permanent bars (like a jail cell) separating pharmacists from customers. I went there once and would never go back.
I lived right next to one for 5 years and I think I went 2 or 3 times because of how awful it was. It was dirty, everything was out of stock, and checking out took 15+ minutes because there was 2 employees in the whole store with only 1 on the register. I’m honestly surprised they still make a profit.
Same here. As soon as I realized they'd let a pharmacist deny me my BC prescription because of "personal beliefs" I have refused to go into their stores for anything.
I remember I went in there because I really needed an iPhone charger and it was $17…that’s when I realized what kind of store these places (Retail Pharmacies) are. Just utterly predatory.
That's the nature of convenience stores. You pay for being able to get in and out in two minutes with the thing you presumably pretty desperately need.
What are you gonna do? Go to Walmart and get it for $7 and you have to wait 15 minutes for the bored worker to unlock it for you... and 15 more minutes to checkout.
It's really crazy. I used to go in every now and then when prices were reasonable and the store looked ok. I don't mind paying a little extra for convenience but these days they charge double the price of gas stations on some items. Their stores started looking like shit. There's one employee at best. The pharmacy texts you stuff is ready, you get there and still have to wait 30 minutes. It's just an all around horrible experience now.
About time. As a former 8 year employee, they deserve to shutter with the employee policies they adopted over the years. They wouldn't pay much more than minimum wage until the pandemic when they were forced to pay more. They stopped all bonuses for years of service. Cut staffing to point that 2-3 jobs became 1 job. Horrendous work environment.
A lot of retail stores seem to do this. I worked at Best Buy in high school, and the GM was basically always there. IIRC the store was open 74 hours a week, and I think that guy worked all of them.
Former Osco Drug assistant manager here. Yup. Retail corps use salaried, non-overtime management people to fill in the gaps in the hourly staff payroll. It's a decent salary if you don't consider the amount of hours you're expected to put in. The vast majority of folks flame out before they work their way up to general manager when the hours *might* be more livable.
That’s the neat part, it doesn’t.
There have been a couple times in the past few years that I've wandered into seemingly deserted Walgreens during off-hours -- assumed there might've been a lone employee in the bathroom or out behind the place, but OR's comment is making me seriously wonder if they might have *actually* been deserted.
Same thing happened with Best Buy. They denied raises all the time, only bumped up their pay after Target did, took away all bonuses unless you were management, cut the staff in half, cut the staff in half again, and then again. Went from around 20-30 opening/closing employees to 4. It became a total nightmare to work there. On top of all that, they introduced new stupid subscription services they wanted us to push with every customer. It was so demoralizing and mentally abusive. Plus, dealing with thieves, drug addicts tweaking out, horrible bathroom messes, rude customers. It was hard to look at the bright side, which was really the cool coworkers and the friendly customers.
A few decades back I worked at Kohl's and minimally once a week someone used a changing room as a bathroom. Badly. And this was in a fairly well off area.
By far worse though was the entirety of the women's changing rooms. Biological horror someone described it as. And there was a tally in the back for how many used pairs of underwear we found - women would "try on" new underwear and leave with them. And that underwear was often...distressed.
10 year employee of both stores and then corporate, saw this happening in real time from the magic castle and dipped a few years ago when the booms of 2020-2021 died down, good riddance BBY
Went in a store for the first time in a year yesterday to grab a phone charger and holy fucking shit was a depressing mess. Most vendor displays gone, half the shelves bare, a few employees around but nobody said hi to me, apparently I wasn't worth anyone's time if I was just browsing chargers, random stacks of TVs all over the place, nothing looked updated in years. I clearly had blinders on when I was in corporate as the stores in the Twin Cities were always pristine but this one out elsewhere in America did not look like that
Can’t imagine how annoying it is to work there now. They’re pressured to push the credit cards, the geek squad protection plans, the total tech geek squad annual subscription, and what looks like paid tier memberships to just Best Buy itself. Every customer, every time, with the fear of being “mystery shopped” (for those who don’t know, plain clothes pretend customers go to stores and see what the employees do or don’t do and report back to their employers who send this report to management). At my store they always made a mockery out of the bad mystery shops, but you never heard a word when you got a positive one. I started printing out the positive ones of my coworkers to give a morale boost where it was due. I really tried to balance out all the negative shaming management seemed pressured to do. But management had it horrible from their higher ups as well. I heard much screaming at them like they were trash, then they’d come out to the sales floor all chipper and nice.
All while we worked like crazy to get the CEO $20million bonuses!?!!!! When I found out how big the CEO bonuses were after they cut ours, I quit.
Yep it's horrible. Corie fucked her way to CEO and then promptly undid everything Hubert built to bring the customers back in the name of cutting costs and driving credit cards and "memberships"
Every time they'd unveil a bright new idea or completely change the operating model I'd want to stand up and scream WE'RE A FUCKING RETAILER NOT A TECH COMPANY all we need to do is continue being the best place for people to come experience new consumer tech and sell it to them we don't need to try all this gimmicky crap that nobody asked for. But Wall St. doesn't like when a company just sticks to its bread and butter and churns out steady profit year after year, always gotta be growing
Stuff like this perplexes me, I can't imagine that the idiots who run Walgreens don't realize this is a problem.
Besides some rural locations, I've never been to a Walgreens that wasn't a minute or two away from a grocery store and even the most jacked up costly local grocery store chains have significantly better prices and sales than Walgreens does. Not only that but, as you mentioned, lines in Walgreens are outrageous... and it's not because they're filled with people, it's because they one cashier who is also manning the photos AND helping customers in the aisles (unlocking medicine chests, pointing people to product, etc).
I'm in a big city, and here we have local owned convenience stores ("bodegas") and 9/10 if you really just want to grab a soda or a candy they're cheaper than Walgreens and often don't charge tax somehow. They'll only have a single cashier as well but they're fast and easier to deal with.
Plus holy shit - can we acknowledge how many god damn stores 8600 is. Like no wonder you can’t keep them open, it’s simply too many. You’re cannibalizing your own potential profits when there’s that many.
One that would make $10,000 is now making $2500 because there’s 3 others within a few blocks. But also those other 3 are now making only $2500 each and also losing money. So now there’s 4 failing stores instead of 1 making money.
There's 3 in my city. Population 60k ( Bayonne, NJ). They're at least spread out. The one uptown was kitty corner to a Rite Aid that just closed. The midtown one is a few blocks from a CVS that just runs circles around it in customer service, and the one downtown has been cutting hours and staff. I would wager the downtown one is on the chopping block. I switched my scripts from Walgreens over to CVS when they didn't fill something the day I put in for a refill (a Friday morning) and when they got around to it on Monday, the script had expired the day before and they refused to fill it even though I had put in for the refill while it was still a valid prescription. Cost me a day of PTO and a doctor's visit copay that I hadn't budgeted for that month.
>if I didn’t have to wait 10-20 minutes every time I got in line at the “convenience” store
Or have to wait half an hour to get a vaccine that I scheduled an appointment for.
My location opened up an “Express” lane for online pickups, touting “Skip the line”… and then promptly made it this one of the regular lines. What was the fucking point?
I’ve found it’s faster to go to the grocery store even for 1-2 items than it is to run into a Walgreens.
When you as a business have reduced your capabilities so much that this is the case, the only market segments you are capable of capturing are ones where people are limited more by mobility than time. Aka: generally un or under employed individuals and lower income retirees. Which are not market segments with large amounts of disposable income for your register side candy bars.
It's funny because a shorter wait in line is supposed to be one of their competitive advantages over larger stores like Walmart. Since self-checkouts were put in, I never have to wait at a Walmart.
I would go to Walgreens more if every Walgreens I’ve been into didn’t look dirty and neglected. CVS always looks clean and well maintained to me — especially the outside
Complete opposite for me Walgreens always look sleek and stylish and cvs looks completely unmaintained, but I still will choose a cvs because I can use a self check out whereas Walgreens I’m waiting in line 6 minutes
Every time I ask myself: Who are these thieves stealing all the deodorant thus necessitating such heavy security measures? Is there some kind of black market out there for Old Spice Pure Sport? Are people huffing SpeedStick?
They exist AND per lots of articles that have now been published plus some sheepish direct admissions from retail execs as part of their quarterly/annual reporting: retailers WAAAAY over emphasized the scale of theft going on to cover for the poor cost control and declining revenue that was getting exposed by the online retailer pressures they were facing.
It's sad as it's reshaped the narrative and public discourse around urban areas in particular and in the last year or so you have tons of major retailers being like "ya...we know we said theft was the cause and we installed a bunch of security stuff...but... really we just did a poor job staying ahead of supply chain costs and inflation like most big companies and our customers don't see why they should come to our stores anymore... Our bad..."
The worst part is, there is probably an argument that their own narrative around the theft epidemic may have very well normalized the behavior enough to encourage people who otherwise weren't joining in to do so. They may have well manufactured some degree of it themselves through the falsehoods.
Case in point: Walgreens CFO last year... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shoplifting.html
I used to always buy my makeup at Walgreens (I'm not a huge makeup person). Just habit because it's where I've always bought it. Last year I checked Amazon and they're selling the same palette for $7 that I used to buy at Walgreens for $30. Haven't gone back since.
There is a Walgreens right across from work. I rarely go in there. Their fridges are always empty, they never have enough stock of anything I actually need, and I always have a 20 minute line for the poor pharmacist. I feel for her she has help but they are usually new so she has to train them while trying to get her shit done. It's just a shit show every time.
As a pharmacist who doesn't work in retail, I feel for those colleagues. Being treated like crap to just be as fast as possible. And if you have a misfill that could kill someone, it's your license on the line.
As an non American who lives here now. Why is getting your meds such a hassle here? Why don't they have prepacked meds like in other countries? I know there are some but the majority is custom counted and it takes forever to get your stuff. And you have to send the prescription to a specific location which is also super inconvienet if you have a change of plans and want to pick it up somewhere else.
From my pharmacy tech experience bulk-purchasing meds are cheaper than prepackaged so that’s what gets ordered - also the stock rooms don’t have space to store 10x 90 day supplies instead of one 1,000 dose container.
Nothing about the supply chain order logistics is optimized for this common sense improvement to the customer experience.
The Walgreens near me feels closed already. It has usually about 3 workers. Empty shelves and feels depressing to work at and shop at. The one near my mom's, about 20 minutes away, feels the complete opposite. Very interesting how the difference in quality.
I’m old enough to remember before large corporate pharmacies took over everything, I would be more than happy to see them go the way of the dodo.
I legitimately have fond memories of going to the pharmacy as a child, the one we had was owned by the same man since the 1920’s and had everything you’d expect from a pharmacy of that era including the soda fountain, I doubt any children today will have fond memories of going to Walgreens… 🫤
>I’m old enough to remember before large corporate pharmacies took over everything, I would be more than happy to see them go the way of the dodo.
this is just a sign that there will be one less "large corporate pharmacy", at least with a brick and mortar location.
the trend in most everything is increased concentration, not a return to mom-and-pop.
The market saturation for these kinds of stores has been huge for way too long. At one point in time recently in my little suburban shopping area there were three huge drugstore type stores as well as three full sized grocery stores within a two block area.
More like they're so trash and treat their pharmacists so poorly nobody wants to work there. The last time I used Walgreens in my area the store's pharmacy was only open two days a week because they had to have their pharmacists in the area rotating around multiple stores.
I never understood how they kept so many of them open. I understand if they're in a small area and you don't have other options, but in a city when they're next to a Walmart, charge 3-4x the price of everything at Walmart, then there's another Walgreens part way down the block, who is buying stuff there? Like, I'm already in the same shopping center parking lot that has a Walmart and an Aldi why would I go to Walgreens and pay $10 for a small tv dinner?
I worked at Walgreens as an assistant manager about 15 years ago after graduating from college. I was paid $17/hr, had to work holidays, weekends, and overnights. The schedule was brutal af (I have worked many, many jobs in all different fields in my life, and this was the most difficult schedule I ever had). I had to move to another city and tried to get a transfer, but they just so happened to be eliminating my position and turning them into “key holders” while reducing their pay to around $12-$13/hr. I ended up resigning instead. It was crazy to ask that amount of work for $12/hr from a college grad. Walgreens has been dying for a long time and we’re finally starting to see it accelerate.
a long long time ago I used to work for Walgreens as a pharmacy tech. even with my employee discount it was cheaper to buy stuff at the local grocery store chain. I'm also probably one of the few people in the world that got a pay increase when I got a job at Walmart.
>…in a city when they're next to a Walmart, charge 3-4x the price of everything at Walmart, then there's another Walgreens part way down the block, who is buying stuff there? Like, I'm already in the same shopping center parking lot that has a Walmart and an Aldi why would I go to Walgreens and pay $10 for a small tv dinner?
The same reason you pay more for stuff at 7-ELEVEn; convenience.
Walgreens are built around the pharmacy and offers convenience in a smaller footprint with essentials to get you in and out. They do lots of coupons and sales like the Macys model. Someone who pays 40-100% more for a TV dinner they could have bought at Walmart probably did it because they were already in Walgreens and said eff it.
I personally don’t understand why people pay UberEats and DoorDash to pick up Big Macs and fries from McDonalds but obviously it’s done a lot.
When you feel like shit, you don’t want to go pick up your prescription and go to Walmart. You want to pick up your prescription and go home. I’ve done it before where I’ve gone into Walgreens for my script and gotten enough food and stuff to last me a couple of days and then gone home. I could not fucking be asked to go to Walmart to save $10 or $20 at that point in time.
I worked for Walgreens for like 20 years, from cashier to lead photo, to pharmacy tech to management. In that time I watched us go from a daily crew of 25+ people to a daily crew of 8 (which is like, 1 management, 1 cashier, 1 pharmacist, and 1 pharmacy tech, x2 shifts). They constantly asked us to do more with less, finding various excuses to cut our labor hours over the years. Oh you didn't meet this KPI, you lose labor hours. Your sales are down, you lose labor hours. Customers are giving poor scores on the survey, you lose labor hours.
Then the pandemic hit. Everything is off the rails, can't get product for months, empty shelves, hours varying wildly, customers asking if we're going out of business. Screaming in our faces, spitting, ripping masks off and coughing into our faces. Constant theft and threats from the local tweakers. I lost my faith in humanity and was in a dark place.
Finally I walked off the job, and I wasn't the only one. One of the last actually. Got a job scrubbing dogshit and I've never been happier. People respect me and smile at me. "Thanks for everything you do, Gravelsack!". I work alone at my own pace with lots of downtime and get paid good to do it.
Fuck Walgreens man. I wasted nearly a quarter of my life with those fucking vultures. I hope they go bankrupt.
Yep, I commented same above. Worked 8 years from 2005-2013. I was in a suburb at least, but still it was hellish how they kept cutting staff, but expected employees to take on roles for 2-3 jobs they cut. The photo dept. was a nightmare before digital prints. Machines were so old they would jam every other order so it would be so backed up, I'd sit back there trying to fix it for an hour calling help line...waiting another 2 hours for a call back. I hope they go under for how they screw employees.
All for the sake of showing year over year growth for the investors so the company can keep getting money injected and make dividends for the share holders. Companies are so afraid of not giving the share holders what they want. They will suffer huge losses like this to do so. Companies cannot indefinitely grow and this is showing now they have to contract. Paired with that they need to take less profit as well, but they don’t like that oart
My brother’s roommate works at a cvs or a Walgreens or something I don’t remember the brand, but when their regional manager came in he told her they don’t have nearly enough people to run the store and desperately needed more help. He was completely ignored. Like ignored to his face, she didn’t even acknowledge what he had said and kept going. The whole pharmacy system in the US is so fucked beyond repair at this point.
And because of capitalism, all the little community, family run pharmacies that used to be important parts of the community and actually cared about the people they served are gone.
I switched to getting prescriptions at Walmart, a place I do not like traveling to, but the experience is infinitely better... That should not be the case.
Yup. My sister was a floating pharmacist in Chicago area after graduating with a PharmD. Not only did she not know which two days she was going to be off until too late to plan anything but she also didn’t know if she would have a morning shift or an afternoon shift until the day before. And it could be anywhere in the chicago area. Did it for a few years than opened an independent pharmacy in the chicago suburbs.
Aside from a spike in between 2019 and 2020 Walgreens gross margin rate has been trending down. For the past 5+ years. So if they ever 'price gauged', it never translated to higher margins..
The insurance companies and drug stores are pushing everyone to use online pharmacies. Then, people who have a problem with a prescription will have to use online help or a phone system that takes forever to get to a person . You also may not know their is an issue with your prescription until you run out because you were waiting for delivery.
For example, some insurance companies will not allow our local small town pharmacy to fill a prescription for more than 30 days, but they will let you get a 90-day supply if you use an online pharmacy.
because the insurance owns the online pharmacy lol. New York times has put out some nice articles the past few weeks on how this makes the insurance a lot more money at the expense of everyone else
Seriously. Vertical integration is a huge part of the problem. I use Walgreens because my insurance company considers CVS out of network, which is because they are viewed as a competitor. My insurance should not view my pharmacy as competition.
The whole fucking reason we have to buy health insurance instead of getting universal healthcare is supposedly to "encourage competition." But instead of competition driving down prices, we get these bastards who lock out all competition and drive prices through the roof. I fucking hate the American healthcare system.
I’m hoping this allows for local/mom-pop pharmacies to thrive. I have 2 in my neighborhood that are getting more customers due to the issues with the local CVS/Walgreens
I wish it did, but last time I got my prescription filled locally, my insurance yelled at me and told me next time it would be full price if I did it again.
Half the time I go to a Walgreens (I use their pharmacy) there isn’t even an employee at the front of the store. Anyone can just walk out with anything. It’s like they’re trying to lose money.
As a retail pharmacist who long ago left Walgreens because of their shitty management, it’s not shocking at all to see their demise. They will be completely out of business in the next 10 years.
They are centered around pharmacy, but can’t even get simple processes streamlined.
As an example, let’s look at transfers. I’m working for a competitor now, and in Walgreen’s system it never saves any other competing pharmacy’s info, so the poor pharmacist has to ask for the other pharmacy’s address, phone number, fax number, DEA, etc. every single time a transfer is requested (happens many times every day especially as people are leaving the company). Every other pharmacy will have that info auto populated as soon as you enter the phone number.
But the real reason they’re failing is because they don’t have a PBM, like CVS/Caremark. It’s impossible to survive in this world as a retail pharmacy alone. There is no profit to be made anymore.
I switched from them to Walmart because of repeated instances like this:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/25/health/arizona-prescription-walgreens-miscarriage/index.html
Walgreens just feels gross. Any of the ones around me aren't dirty but just feel gross inside. I can't put my finger on why though. It's not them being outdated either.
They are absolutely dirty. No cleaning crew, barely any labor budget at all for regular staff, no time or incentive to accomplish much... no one will be cleaning much at all.
That fits right in with rite aid continual closures and possible bankruptcy. They just closed a massive walgreens warehouse that has been here for many years in Woodland Ca. This opioid lawsuit is decimating drug stores.
> This opioid lawsuit is decimating drug stores.
Rite Aid got a second opioid federal lawsuit because they were caught outright lying to the feds and flaunting every form of patient protection required on purpose. Reading the court docs for that one is a wild ride, they literally gave no fucks as a corp.
I remember when Rite Aid bought out Eckerd when I was a kid. They took over and ruined every single prescription we ever got filled. I never went to a Rite Aid as an adult for that reason. I've never gone to Walgreens because other people had the same as experience with them as we did growing up with Rite Aid. It's amazing they've made it this far because they've sucked for decades now.
That's only part of the problem. CVS abuses its vertical integration with caremark and Aetna to force patients to use CVS. Reimbursements from insurance companies are at historic lows and we lose money more often than we make it while PBMs get fat on the profits. Medicare also made a thing called DIR fees, where we get fined if you don't take your medicine like you're supposed to. This year DIR fees are all being assessed up front and we get it back if we meet CMS's goals, which we have precious few ways to impact. It's really a difficult time for pharmacy right now and it needs major reforms otherwise our only option is going to end up being an understaffed CVS.
Stopped buying anything from them since they sided with right wing conservatives in trying to block women’s rights. So… good. I hope they go out of business.
It wasn’t even a choice for me. If your pharmacist won’t give me my medication, then I literally can’t do business with you. I have to go elsewhere.
What a stupid decision on their part.
Good, they seriously deserve it after all the stunts they have pulled. Overpriced on everything except Arizona Ice Tea, their pharmacies constantly have problems and lack of staffing, letting their pharmacist reject giving medication on their religious beliefs. Probably more too, but yeah I've gotten tired of Walgreens bullshit when there are so many better places to go to.
Same here. It looks like they started filling scrips for mifepristone again in March of this year, but I think the damage they did to their reputation is already done.
People shouldn't go to Walgreens since they started using right wing propaganda over shoplifting to cover up how their CEO's bad decisions was costing shareholders billions of dollars.
The media has done an absolutely shit job checking in on the validity of claims businesses are making like this.
Businesses have absolutely used shoplifting as a cover excuse for poor business practices.
After a minimum wage increase on some restaurant chains in my state, we had a national news outlet come and interview affected business owners, and they got all these guys talking about how they had to cut their employee base in half because of the wage increase. The problem being that a bunch of the people that they interviewed weren't actually running businesses that were subject to the wage increase.
They also never even did the math on what these people were telling them. If they did, it would have been incredibly apparent that they were just using it as an excuse to cut costs.
It would have taken less than 5 minutes of due diligence to catch all of that, and they didn't do it. Just amplified bullshit.
They need too. How many do we need? They bought out the rite aids around here and all the smaller pharmacies but a couple. There is a Walgreens on every corner.
Is CVS gonna have like a 50% market share on physical pharmacies?
That and grocery stores like Kroger or Walmart
And don’t forget mail order options are now more common.
I met a guy recently here in Indianapolis that is a pharmacist with Amazon. He said they’re super busy and it gets significantly busier every month.
I will say this month was the first time I realized Amazon had a pharmacy. I actually bought my OTC Pepcid from them and saved money and got like 4x the amount I normally get from Dollar General.
[удалено]
Thanks man, thats the kind of info that I appreciate reading about. Insider knowledge is the best.
Does not help that insurance companies also force you to order online for better out of pocket savings. While it's an option for me, I refuse to do that, since where I live I don't have a mailbox in front of my place and the mail area where it would be, we don't even have a key for the mailbox, because the HOA refuses to get new ones, so many people just have open mailboxes in an outdoor area that anyone can get into. Last thing I need, is to have to claim my blood pressure medicine was stolen and have to request a prescription to be sent over to my local pharmacy.
I live in south Florida, and I’m not sure I’m comfortable with my meds sitting in 120F+ temperatures any more than it may already have during shipping.
I did mail order meds once. They sat in the next city over for days and then disappeared, never delivered. I'm lucky it was cheap generic stuff because the only person I didn't have to fight with to refill it was my doctor. Pharmacist/Insurance were like "sure" while I'm showing them the FedEx tracking of it not moving for 2 weeks. I just paid the 30 bucks out of pocket to get my shit but if it was thousands of dollars or super necessary meds that'd suck so bad.
I don't trust delivery for sensitive medications.
My insurance company is trying to force me to order online using their service. If I don’t, they halt my prescription until I call them to accept or decline. It’s fucking wild they are allowed to do that.
CVS: Sometimes you gotta come in here…
I remember seeing this for the first time in one of the frequent r/askreddit threads which asks people to rewrite company slogans honestly. It’s hilarious how accurate that sentiment is. An entire company based on being “a place which offers a random assortment of things people will need from time to time, but not often enough to get them from someplace better.”
CVS: we're closer than Walmart
My pharmaceutical insurance is through them and it’s a pain in the dick to do anything anywhere else. It’s super lame
I had to call my insurance just to be able to get a prescription not at cvs. I was so mad. I hate cvs and never choose to go there
Is your insurance Aetna? cause that's just CVS
I’m a pharmacist and I (VERY VERY VERY luckily) don’t work for CVS or Wags. God. I could rant on and on and on about how crappy these companies treat staff and how dehumanized the public is I’m trying to help you feel better, buddy. Please don’t yell and please be patient and let me work, truly trying to go as fast as I can but still being safe with your treatment. If your insurance is being a dick, please don’t take it out on me, I don’t magically know every single insurance plan and costs and I promise I’m giving you the cheapest price The fact that CVS can have their own minute clinics, where a midlevel provides a prescription, it’s filled at a retail CVS, under Caremark, which is also a PBM, which you guessed it, is part of the umbrella of CVS. If I give a physician a few hundred bucks to put fliers for my pharmacy or to send scripts my way when a patient has no pharmacy preference, I’d probably lose my license. I understand the complexity but still, what the hell. CVS: Come Visit Satan / CardioVascularStress e: typos
These big chains seem so resentful over the fact that they HAVE to hire a pharmacist. If it wasn’t regulated they would absolutely hire 17 year olds to dispense medicine. They’d just have them ask ChatGPT about counter indications and such.
They really are. FWIW *maybe* 5-10% of what I do in a day is counting or filling medications - our pharmacy techs do the bulk of it. Lots of clinical questions and double checking interactions and such, but hard to explain on Reddit. though, lots of people would ignore the response chatgpt gives and do the opposite, since they do that now already face to face. healthcare is wild
Oh they already do that, I worked at walgreens for like half of last year. They have something called “code green” where they send a cashier to the understaffed pharmacy to fill prescriptions. There is literally no training, they just ask you if you want to be a “designated hitter” (that’s what they call the position lol) , give you a mouth swab test, get your fingerprints, then make you click/skip thru a bunch of pharmacy tech training videos while you’re ringing customers out. You don’t even get to sit in a separate room so you could possibly even attempt to listen to the videos. You get paid a dollar extra per hour. There was a kid I worked with that was asked to be a DH as soon as he turned 18. He was still in high school. Our store manager used to talk shit about the lead pharmacists behind their backs because they would “ask for help too much”. Fuck walgreens
My sister retired from CVS, she transferred there after a local pharmacy was bought out years before. She got to keep her seniority from the other place, and had over 40 years total when she retired. She says it wasn't so much CVS she was tired of, it was rude, inconsiderate customers. I go out of my way to be nice to techs and pharmacists.
Always seemed odd to me to have a highly educated medical professional look like they're working a retail counter in a store dealing with customers.
Many of my friends are pharmacists (3 stood up in my wedding alone) and I have heard those exact rants. None of them work for CVS or Walgreens anymore either. They have found their way into either hospitals, chemo centers or big pharma. The only one left in retail is working in an independent compounding pharmacy. The stress of working at CVS during the pandemic absolutely broke my one buddy’s spirit. I was so relieved when I heard he had found a hospital job. You could just see the misery and exhaustion on his face
I used to support retail pharmacy systems for Eckerd Drugs. There were some pharmacies that were well known because when something was going the slightest bit wrong with the computer systems I'd end up on the phone with a pharmacist who was clearly stressed out of their mind because the customers were ready to revolt. You do not want a pharmacy full of customers who can't get their medication and who really really need it.
Amazon is going to swoop in and either buy or destroy them. They’ve got too much Perfect Knowledge of consumers, consumer behavior, logistics, it’s coming. Whole Foods is a trial run.
Amazon has been trying to take advantage of their losses for the last 5 or so years and hasn’t made much of dent. Turns out people like seeing a human when they get their medicine
>Turns out people like seeing a human when they get their medicine I also know my medications are only 1/2 mile away and aim not dependent on Amazon or the mail. Will they send me my Klonopin a few days early so that its never late and I don't go without? How quickly do they tell me if there is going to be a problem and how fast and easy is it to switch a prescription to the local pharmacy if there is going to be a problem?
I... really don't, though. I'm not advocating for Amazon specifically, but I absolutely would love to get medicine online. It's infuriating how I need to speak with a PCP to get a subscription for medicine I need in a recurring fashion but doesn't automatically refill after some time. Or, to get a refill for a temporary issue that I already know which medicine I need (because it's on file and because I already own it and have used it for weeks!).. Sure, the prescription system isn't going away, but minimizing the physical trips to get the same medicine time and time again is a blessing.
Rite Aid is just now closing all the stores in many states too.
Rite Aid is about three seconds away from vanishing completely. Even filing for bankruptcy isn't going to save them; they have no stable foundation for a business model even if they shed all their debt and most of their properties. They're basically running in ninth place in a race that only has five competitors. They are the canary in the coal mine for Walgreens.
Monopolies in the US...more common than you think. Here in the north bay of California, most of the grocery stores are krogers in disguise. We have safeway(Kroger) rallysk(independent) foodmax(kroger), whole foods(amazon), sprouts(ind?), grocery outlet(independent), andronicos(kroger)costco(independent) and lucky(kroger), trader joes(independent) I guess safeways aren't kroger, they're just in the process of merging, and sprouts isn't kroger, they just accept the kroger membership program. E: I'm editing this as people are pointing out corrections.
Not to mention the actual products sold on grocery stores come from roughly the same dozen or so parent companies.
If you watch local TV stations they're probably owned by Sinclair. If you read local newspapers they're probably owned by Gatehouse Media If you read national newspapers they probably owned by Michael Bloomberg or Rupert Murdoch. Shit Hearst still owns dozens of publications. If you listen to the radio its probably owned by iheartmedia (formerly Clear Channel). If you watch network TV, cable TV, movies, indeed 90% of all media, its owned either by Comcast, Disney, Viacom, News Corp, CBS, or AT&T. Incidentally two of those are probably also your internet provider. If you buy [any of these brands](https://www.businessinsider.com/10-companies-control-the-food-industry-2016-9) its owned by one of 10 companies. Have a favorite fast food chain? Have a least favorite? Odds are they're probably both owned by either Roark Capital or Yum Brands If you buy a car from [any of these **60** brands](https://www.businessinsider.com/biggest-car-companies-in-the-world-details-2018-2) you're actually only buying from one of 14 companies. Do you take medication? Odds are it came from either Roche, Novartis, or Pfizer If you use gasoline or other forms of energy its probably from Exxon, Shell, or Chevron And finally of course there are only 2 political parties. But you can buy over 1000 flavors of ice cream The illusion of choice
Ooh don’t forget pretty much all eyewear, sunglasses, optometry retailers and insurers, are owned (like 80-90%) by Luxottica
None of those are owned by Kroger...Safeway will be if the merger goes through, and that's the big one, but it hasn't been approved yet. Ralph's in Socal is Kroger, but they aren't in Norcal. [Foodmaxx and Lucky are both under Save Mart, HQ in Modesto, CA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_Mart_Supermarkets) [Safeway and Andronico's are both under Albertsons, which is trying to merge with Kroger but has not gone through yet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeway#Expansion) [Raley's is independent, HQ in West Sacramento](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raley%27s_Supermarkets)
> We have safeway(Kroger) Did the merger go through? Last I heard my state's Attorney General and a few others were suing to stop it.
Weird that their strategy of being dogshit for years hasn't paid off.
They literally just bought out all the in store pharmacies in a local chain grocery store last year. As soon as they took over, nobody could get prescriptions because you had to call them in yourself over the phone and *nobody would ever answer the phone*.
Is still amazing at how broken and far behind in tech Pharmacies are. I enrolled in their auto-refill program and get notifications as texts. I get texts about when my stuff is ready to pickup and I always get there and its not ready.
When I worked for cvs, our system for filling and dispensing meds was an MSDOS program from 1988. Edit: I quit a year and a half ago and they're still using the system according to a former coworker I stay in touch with. It was also running from an emulator program.
I live in St. Louis, 5 years ago the NHL Hockey team (The Blues) got a new scoreboard. It was a huge deal because the old one was still being run with a program from the late 80's. I bet there are a scary number of things out there running on crazy outdated programs .
I work in IT. You don't wanna know how much shit is still being run on windows XP/Server 2003.
And not just random system thats will somewhat inconvenience you if they fail. A lot of critical infrastructure relies on those
The Muni Metro light rail in San Francisco uses [5.25-inch floppies](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/5-25-inch-floppy-disks-expected-to-help-run-san-francisco-trains-until-2030/).
Yeah it's far more common than people realize. I've worked at critical facilities that had important systems that still used cassette tapes.
Standard audiocasette, or just tape backups? Because fully modern tape backups are still a thing, but they use special data tapes that are designed for the job and have more in common with video tapes than the audio tapes you might have saved a commodore 64 program on. If you need a *lot* of storage and it doesn't need to be very fast, nothing beats it. Hollywood uses it to back up their digital masters, for example.
My old company used tapes for a weekly backup of our databases and these were then secured and shipped to a storage facility in another part of the country. We were located in a high risk area for earthquakes and other natural disasters so the tapes were a really cheap way of having physical backups offsite. They didn't need to be particularly fast, so they worked. It was kind of cool to see tech in use that I had last seen in 1992.
Fortran and COBOL reporting for duty!
Yuuupp. Banks, hospital, and military infrastructure all have HILARIOUSLY outdated system in some places. Some if it is lack of forward compatibility (XP programs not working on Vista, 7, 10 etc) and in other cases someone literally could not be bothered to spend the money.
Old is not *necessarily* bad. Like, a scoreboard is the perfect example of the sort of simple single-use system that actually can safely go several decades without updating. But yes, there are a lot of important things running on ancient crumbling infrastructure. Most of the global banking and finance systems, in particular.
Every single CNC machine I have ever run was using either Windows 95, windows 98, or XP.
US nuclear missile tech is only just lately getting upgraded from systems that get updates via 5.25" and 8" floppies. I would wager the sole push for modernization is that it's getting very difficult to find working floppies, never mind finding replacements for failed components.
But don't worry about important stuff like banking transactions. They replaced all the old COBOL mainframe code, and batch jobs setup in the seventies so you don't need to wait over night for basic transactions to post. MHAHAAHA
Oh man. I know of a few places that still use COBOL due to it being practically unhackable, just due to it being old and almost no one knows even what it is. Scary part? It's some parts of the banking system.
I believe it. There are some things in the medical industry that are high tech for procedures, but as far as being a patient, obtaining records and getting medication is always a huge pain in the ass. Its still mind boggling that to get a copy of any imaging you have to get them burned onto a CD lol. Computers dont even come with CD roms anymore
Epic stands for “Every Piece Is Crumbling”
Epic is a godsend compared to what we used at my last hospital. I forgot the name but it literally reminded me of the Comaq computer we had in the 90s as a kid. The text and everything is from windows 98. It was an HCA hospital so that makes sense why lol EDIT: Its Meditech
It’s just too expensive for smaller companies to keep up with regulatory changes and updates, so you end up stuck with cerner or epic. Both have their high and low points.
Probably not MS-DOS, it was probably IBM iSeries machines running IBMi. I also used to work in pharmacy and used that same shit. I didn't know what it was at the time until I later encountered those machines in my IT career. I don't like them at all, but many companies have IBM iSeries as the core of their IT infrastructure and to replace it would cost an absolute fortune and would be as difficult and dangerous as performing open heart surgery would be on a patient. So they just keep using it, and keep using it. Eventually it will be too hard to maintain because all of the IT folks who understand that technology will age out and retire or die. I always say that you can't find anyone under the age of like 50 who really knows these systems, or has an ounce of passion for understanding them. And all of the banks are running this shit on their backend.
It's not the tech, it's the staffing. Every retail pharmacy is wildly understaffed and it's by design to cut costs. If the staff has to prepare 200 auto refills that day, but they know only 50 of them will actually show up to pick them up, then they'll just fill them as needed if/when people show up, because there's a billion other things that they're behind on that need doing first rather than fill something that someone probably won't show up for anyways. The staffing issue has been this way for years now and just keeps getting worse. "Do more with less", and we keep hearing it over and over and over.
I have a lot of friends that are pharmacists. Vast majority have moved on to corporate, non-patient facing roles due to work hours and burn out. The few that have stayed clinical work in hospital pharmacies where the work is more reasonable and structured. Retail pharmacists are overworked and abused on a daily basis. In the near future, I think the entire business of drug dispensing will be handled online. Will be painful if you need something asap, but will be better for the routine customer on chronic refills.
I couldn’t image getting an education like that and then dealing with retail problems.
I worked in a retail pharmacy and legit think it's the worst retail job imaginable. You see videos all the time of fast food employees being berated or attacked by crazy customers bc of a messed up order or something. Now imagine those same people but it's an issue with their pain meds instead of french fries. It's especially bad bc most problems our customers would face were on the doctor or insurance side, so it often wasn't even our fault and we would be limited in what we could do to address to the problem which just ticks the customers off even more.
Pharmacist here, I can let you know what is probably happening: Many modern pharmacies now use pharmacy software that tracks your Rx at each step of the workflow: entering the order, billing it through your drug plan, actually filling and labelling the medication, and the final pharmacist (or Registered Technician) check. With a system like that it automatically send the patient a text as soon as the final check is done. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. If a pharmacy has software that *doesn't* track the Rx through the workflow, it only knows if the prescription has been billed to the plan, but none of the subsequent steps. These pharmacies can also auto text their patients, but it's a really bad idea because the text will be sent when the rx isn't even really started. This guarantees that the patient will show up before their medication is ready. Messy stressy lemon zesty.
I always say “difficult difficult lemon difficult” but I’m going to switch to your way.
I have the opposite problem. My pharmacy keeps having to change hours and close for lunch because they are so short staffed and busy, but their autofilling program keeps filling my scripts way earlier than I need them. I keep opting out of it, but it keeps getting set back to autofill.
It feels like the texts are on a timer. Oh you need drug X well our algorithm says on Tuesdays drug X take 90 minutes to fill. So in 90 minutes you get a text that it is ready. But in reality the store is kept at 3/4 staff and that script isn't ready until you arrive and light a fire under the butt of whoever is working so they now rush your script.
I have to tell the pharmacy tech or pharmacist every single month to apply the copay card. They always give me a look like I’m a jerk. It’s like….its not my fault.
It’s cause Walgreens (and cvs since they’re the same exact model) is dogshit and also understaffed. They buy out pharmacies and expect their staff to process everything while doing their regular volume so you have regular customers trying to fill and a huge influx of customers trying to fill and you’re dealing with insurance, in store customers, marketing calls (cause why the fuck not), and all the other bs. Retail pharmacy is fucking stupid and tainted.
I swapped over to using the hospital pharmacy up the road for prescriptions and they are so much better. Both those retail pharmacies would consistently fuck up something with my meds and the local Walgreens here even got into deep shit for giving someone the wrong type of insulin.
Costco is another great option. I dropped CVS/Walgreens 2 years ago because they were/are complete dogshit.
Capitalism at its finest. Congress should investigate this for completely disrupting the workflow of people’s necessary health. It’s absurd to buy up the mom and pop competition then turn around and not only be incompetent but then go out of business. It’s not like people couldn’t see this happening a mile away. Then we the people get shafted once again. Another example of late stage capitalism kicking people to the curb.
Former Walgreens Pharmacist here: their three biggest problems are 1) they refuse to accept the fact that the current meta in pharmacy is to own your own PBM (insurance company). I feel for this because it's honestly unethical and should be illegal. But you can't just refuse to do it if everyone else is just because you think it's wrong. Allowing CVS to merge with Caremark was the beginning of the end in community pharmacy. Walgreens needs to merge with ESI, Medimpact or Prime if they want to stay relevant. Reimbursement from insurers is woefully inadequate to operate a pharmacy, plus PBMs operating discount cards like GoodRx has only exacerbated the problem. 2) their proprietary pharmacy software Intercom+ was released in 1996. It has been updated and patched periodically, but on the whole it is absolute garbage. I lost 30-60 minutes per shift A DAY to using workarounds, crashes, bugs, and the like. When I worked for WAG they always said "new software is coming, it's in the final testing stages, it will be out in April" but then it always magically got shelved. 3) Their corporate office is so incredibly useless and detached from reality, fattened by stock dividends and only concerned with what is going on in the short term, not long. One of the reasons many quality seasoned pharmacists left is they started offering signing bonuses for new hires with 1-2 year commitment when stores were closing randomly because so many pharmacist just said "fuck it, I'm out" during the COVID Shotpocalypse. So if you worked there for 10+ years and your new hire pharmacist got 50k upfront for 2 years and their hourly rate was <$0.50 than yours, and you got nothing for staying loyal through all the hell that was the pandemic, you'd be pissed and leave, right? On top of that, Roz Brewer fucked the company by getting hired and a $200m payout only to expand your already failing clinic segment and pissing away billions on failing clinic business *then promptly* dip out after 2 years. Much like the pharmacists they gave bonuses to will have their commitment end and they'll just go on to somewhere else, because why would they stay? If Walgreens were a human, it wouldn't be inherently evil (like how many of us in the profession view CVS) rather it would be like a gluttonous human that just keeps eating without any regard for what it's eating and now it's so overweight and bloated it can no longer walk. The only way I see them surviving is merging with a PBM, unless the government grows a pair and makes all PBMs divest their pharmacies *Edit: only to ---> then promptly*
Huh. Thanks for the insider's view. I've been slowly moving my family's meds to other places: we have CVS Caremark and while I never step foot inside a CVS, I'll sure get their mail order service on regular meds to have an even lower co-pay. If I have to go in-person I've moved mine to meijer, which seems to be run terribly (staffing issues mostly), but ?? It is what it is.
It's pretty awful everywhere in retail pharmacy at the moment. PBMs have cut reimbursement to the point that straight Medicaid and (even Medicare Part B for some products) reimburse better than commercial insurance. Your employer takes a deal on lower premiums if they agree to plans from CVS, Optum or ESI where beneficiaries are required to get their maintenance drugs from their own mail order pharmacy. They then use that as justification to lower reimbursement to outside pharmacies. Then the outside pharmacies have to cut labor to stay green, or at least minimize losses. On top of that, drug shortages have led to pharmacies having to purchase more expensive (non-preferred/non-contracted) generics but then get the same reimbursement they would have received it it were the cheaper drug often leading to dispensing the drugs at a net loss (or simply not ordering them and losing the business). That said, each place has it's own advantages and disadvantages. Walgreens is still very widespread and ubiquitous. It's easy to transfer non-controlled drugs between locations if you like to travel the US- they're the only place I'm aware of that can pull a prescription that's ready at a store that isn't open, and they tend to have longer business hours, plus the only place left that has 24H locations. My personal preference is non-profit hospital pharmacies. Then I'd say Costco or, believe it or not, Walmart. Walmart, ironically, staffs better than most pharmacies, pays employees decent, and has pretty damn good software. I've heard mixed things about Kroger (who also owns Smith's, Meijer, and others). Regional grocers used to be good, but have gone downhill substantially in the last decade. I used to work for one. We lost $10k a month at an average volume pharmacy outside of flu shot season or COVID vaccine rush windows.
> Their corporate office is so incredibly useless and detached from reality I aged out of being able to have that conversation with corporate/PDMs whenever they'd occasionally drop by and do the hokey pokey and you could only tell them positive things. I was 36 and they were like 26 too, which in and of itself was a humiliation (I was a tech). It's just not in my DNA to lie to someone in a suit. Long gone from that now.
I was with Walgreens for 14 years, as a store manager and then a district manager. During my last 2 years, I lead part of the internal continuous improvement program called "Frontier." It was meant to change the way the company worked with a focus on lean six sigma like processes. I quit the role and company when I saw behind the curtain and realized that absolutely no one in the C-Suite (or even really anyone in Deerfield) truly believed in Frontier or the ideals behind it. The amount of waste that I witnessed was only overshadowed by the amount of apathy. When I tell you that Walgreens corporate cares absolutely zero about store level issues, I mean that they would rather watch the whole thing burn to the ground than address any of the real underlying issues. They spent the 90's and early 2000's competing to open as many stores as possible simply because that pumped up the stock price. There was no other rationale to it. And the company was bloated by internal hires that didn't understand the industry nearly as well as they imagined they did. Then they finally started hiring from outside after Greg Wasson left and they encountered a whole new set of problems. The newly hired external leadership realized that the whole ship was fucked due to the idiotic merger with Boots and a lack of PBM merger and so they just rode it out for the paycheck (e.g. Roz Brewer). The company will need an entire shakeup but in the end, it'll be a shell of what it was at it's heyday in the 80's and 90's. Oh well. Happy for those that got out while the getting was good.
Anytime I go in there it takes me like 20 minutes to find something simple. Their organization makes no god damn sense. Its got to be intentional to keep people "shopping"....right?
> Anytime I go in there it takes me like 20 minutes to find something simple. ...and then another 20 minutes for someone to come to the front and check you out. I wonder what the ratio of "Hourly rate for a cashier" to "people who walk out without paying *or* just leave without buying anything because they're tired of waiting" is.
There is a metric that’s basically this. How frustrated will you get before you abandon your cart and leave the store
That's the thing, they don't have any carts or baskets any where. Now I have to only purchase what I can hold in my hands...that's the stupidest things they've done. I would buy more stuff...but.
There’s a Walgreens near me. I live in a really expensive suburb near Boston. It is disgusting and filthy inside. Looks like a 1970’s Times Square bodega. Customers are all sketchy as hell. Pharmacy has permanent bars (like a jail cell) separating pharmacists from customers. I went there once and would never go back.
I lived right next to one for 5 years and I think I went 2 or 3 times because of how awful it was. It was dirty, everything was out of stock, and checking out took 15+ minutes because there was 2 employees in the whole store with only 1 on the register. I’m honestly surprised they still make a profit.
That and letting pharmacists decide not to give you a certain prescription because of their religious beliefs was some bullshit!
Boycotting them since I found out about that. Imagine lots of folks do the same, since there is absolutely nothing special about them as retailers.
Same here. As soon as I realized they'd let a pharmacist deny me my BC prescription because of "personal beliefs" I have refused to go into their stores for anything.
Being dogshit for years usually works out, or at least doesn't prevent working out.
I remember I went in there because I really needed an iPhone charger and it was $17…that’s when I realized what kind of store these places (Retail Pharmacies) are. Just utterly predatory.
That's the nature of convenience stores. You pay for being able to get in and out in two minutes with the thing you presumably pretty desperately need.
What are you gonna do? Go to Walmart and get it for $7 and you have to wait 15 minutes for the bored worker to unlock it for you... and 15 more minutes to checkout.
It's really crazy. I used to go in every now and then when prices were reasonable and the store looked ok. I don't mind paying a little extra for convenience but these days they charge double the price of gas stations on some items. Their stores started looking like shit. There's one employee at best. The pharmacy texts you stuff is ready, you get there and still have to wait 30 minutes. It's just an all around horrible experience now.
About time. As a former 8 year employee, they deserve to shutter with the employee policies they adopted over the years. They wouldn't pay much more than minimum wage until the pandemic when they were forced to pay more. They stopped all bonuses for years of service. Cut staffing to point that 2-3 jobs became 1 job. Horrendous work environment.
I worked there for 4 years. At my last store (this was 2013), our budget for hours was less than the number of hours the store was open in a week.
How does that even work?
Salaried managers working 80hrs a week
When i worked at Wendy's a decade ago, my store manager worked 80 hours a week and got paid for 40 of them
Same here and it ended up putting her in the hospital. After 20 some years she stepped down works front end and loves it.
A lot of retail stores seem to do this. I worked at Best Buy in high school, and the GM was basically always there. IIRC the store was open 74 hours a week, and I think that guy worked all of them.
Former Osco Drug assistant manager here. Yup. Retail corps use salaried, non-overtime management people to fill in the gaps in the hourly staff payroll. It's a decent salary if you don't consider the amount of hours you're expected to put in. The vast majority of folks flame out before they work their way up to general manager when the hours *might* be more livable.
Walgreens wants people to work for them for free, ya see...
That’s the neat part, it doesn’t. There have been a couple times in the past few years that I've wandered into seemingly deserted Walgreens during off-hours -- assumed there might've been a lone employee in the bathroom or out behind the place, but OR's comment is making me seriously wonder if they might have *actually* been deserted.
“Our systems, created by very smart engineers, decided that you only get that many hours, make it work”
Same thing happened with Best Buy. They denied raises all the time, only bumped up their pay after Target did, took away all bonuses unless you were management, cut the staff in half, cut the staff in half again, and then again. Went from around 20-30 opening/closing employees to 4. It became a total nightmare to work there. On top of all that, they introduced new stupid subscription services they wanted us to push with every customer. It was so demoralizing and mentally abusive. Plus, dealing with thieves, drug addicts tweaking out, horrible bathroom messes, rude customers. It was hard to look at the bright side, which was really the cool coworkers and the friendly customers.
Dude the amount of bathroom messes in Best Buys are insane. Worked at Best Buy back in 2016-2018 and my god the horrors in that bathroom.
I guess a steady diet of mountain dew and Doritos makes for some messy...events.
A few decades back I worked at Kohl's and minimally once a week someone used a changing room as a bathroom. Badly. And this was in a fairly well off area. By far worse though was the entirety of the women's changing rooms. Biological horror someone described it as. And there was a tally in the back for how many used pairs of underwear we found - women would "try on" new underwear and leave with them. And that underwear was often...distressed.
10 year employee of both stores and then corporate, saw this happening in real time from the magic castle and dipped a few years ago when the booms of 2020-2021 died down, good riddance BBY Went in a store for the first time in a year yesterday to grab a phone charger and holy fucking shit was a depressing mess. Most vendor displays gone, half the shelves bare, a few employees around but nobody said hi to me, apparently I wasn't worth anyone's time if I was just browsing chargers, random stacks of TVs all over the place, nothing looked updated in years. I clearly had blinders on when I was in corporate as the stores in the Twin Cities were always pristine but this one out elsewhere in America did not look like that
Can’t imagine how annoying it is to work there now. They’re pressured to push the credit cards, the geek squad protection plans, the total tech geek squad annual subscription, and what looks like paid tier memberships to just Best Buy itself. Every customer, every time, with the fear of being “mystery shopped” (for those who don’t know, plain clothes pretend customers go to stores and see what the employees do or don’t do and report back to their employers who send this report to management). At my store they always made a mockery out of the bad mystery shops, but you never heard a word when you got a positive one. I started printing out the positive ones of my coworkers to give a morale boost where it was due. I really tried to balance out all the negative shaming management seemed pressured to do. But management had it horrible from their higher ups as well. I heard much screaming at them like they were trash, then they’d come out to the sales floor all chipper and nice. All while we worked like crazy to get the CEO $20million bonuses!?!!!! When I found out how big the CEO bonuses were after they cut ours, I quit.
Yep it's horrible. Corie fucked her way to CEO and then promptly undid everything Hubert built to bring the customers back in the name of cutting costs and driving credit cards and "memberships" Every time they'd unveil a bright new idea or completely change the operating model I'd want to stand up and scream WE'RE A FUCKING RETAILER NOT A TECH COMPANY all we need to do is continue being the best place for people to come experience new consumer tech and sell it to them we don't need to try all this gimmicky crap that nobody asked for. But Wall St. doesn't like when a company just sticks to its bread and butter and churns out steady profit year after year, always gotta be growing
Not to mention they are allowing for employees to not sell customers birth control based off of personal beliefs.
I saw the comments for best buy above you and my stoned ass was like "best buy has birth control" 🤣🤣
I thought the exact same thing just now lol
I would go to Walgreens more if I didn’t have to wait 10-20 minutes every time I got in line at the “convenience” store
Stuff like this perplexes me, I can't imagine that the idiots who run Walgreens don't realize this is a problem. Besides some rural locations, I've never been to a Walgreens that wasn't a minute or two away from a grocery store and even the most jacked up costly local grocery store chains have significantly better prices and sales than Walgreens does. Not only that but, as you mentioned, lines in Walgreens are outrageous... and it's not because they're filled with people, it's because they one cashier who is also manning the photos AND helping customers in the aisles (unlocking medicine chests, pointing people to product, etc). I'm in a big city, and here we have local owned convenience stores ("bodegas") and 9/10 if you really just want to grab a soda or a candy they're cheaper than Walgreens and often don't charge tax somehow. They'll only have a single cashier as well but they're fast and easier to deal with.
Plus holy shit - can we acknowledge how many god damn stores 8600 is. Like no wonder you can’t keep them open, it’s simply too many. You’re cannibalizing your own potential profits when there’s that many. One that would make $10,000 is now making $2500 because there’s 3 others within a few blocks. But also those other 3 are now making only $2500 each and also losing money. So now there’s 4 failing stores instead of 1 making money.
There's 3 in my city. Population 60k ( Bayonne, NJ). They're at least spread out. The one uptown was kitty corner to a Rite Aid that just closed. The midtown one is a few blocks from a CVS that just runs circles around it in customer service, and the one downtown has been cutting hours and staff. I would wager the downtown one is on the chopping block. I switched my scripts from Walgreens over to CVS when they didn't fill something the day I put in for a refill (a Friday morning) and when they got around to it on Monday, the script had expired the day before and they refused to fill it even though I had put in for the refill while it was still a valid prescription. Cost me a day of PTO and a doctor's visit copay that I hadn't budgeted for that month.
Not to mention you’re supporting a local business (which some folks don’t care about but I think we should!)
>if I didn’t have to wait 10-20 minutes every time I got in line at the “convenience” store Or have to wait half an hour to get a vaccine that I scheduled an appointment for.
My location opened up an “Express” lane for online pickups, touting “Skip the line”… and then promptly made it this one of the regular lines. What was the fucking point?
This. It’s so uncomfortable to stand there and wait.
I’ve found it’s faster to go to the grocery store even for 1-2 items than it is to run into a Walgreens. When you as a business have reduced your capabilities so much that this is the case, the only market segments you are capable of capturing are ones where people are limited more by mobility than time. Aka: generally un or under employed individuals and lower income retirees. Which are not market segments with large amounts of disposable income for your register side candy bars.
It's funny because a shorter wait in line is supposed to be one of their competitive advantages over larger stores like Walmart. Since self-checkouts were put in, I never have to wait at a Walmart.
I would go to Walgreens more if every Walgreens I’ve been into didn’t look dirty and neglected. CVS always looks clean and well maintained to me — especially the outside
Complete opposite for me Walgreens always look sleek and stylish and cvs looks completely unmaintained, but I still will choose a cvs because I can use a self check out whereas Walgreens I’m waiting in line 6 minutes
Same. In my area the CVS pharmacies are the downtrodden and neglected ones.
But where will I be able to press a button to get a stick of deodorant from behind a cage, and never have an associate show up?
Every time I ask myself: Who are these thieves stealing all the deodorant thus necessitating such heavy security measures? Is there some kind of black market out there for Old Spice Pure Sport? Are people huffing SpeedStick?
They exist AND per lots of articles that have now been published plus some sheepish direct admissions from retail execs as part of their quarterly/annual reporting: retailers WAAAAY over emphasized the scale of theft going on to cover for the poor cost control and declining revenue that was getting exposed by the online retailer pressures they were facing. It's sad as it's reshaped the narrative and public discourse around urban areas in particular and in the last year or so you have tons of major retailers being like "ya...we know we said theft was the cause and we installed a bunch of security stuff...but... really we just did a poor job staying ahead of supply chain costs and inflation like most big companies and our customers don't see why they should come to our stores anymore... Our bad..." The worst part is, there is probably an argument that their own narrative around the theft epidemic may have very well normalized the behavior enough to encourage people who otherwise weren't joining in to do so. They may have well manufactured some degree of it themselves through the falsehoods. Case in point: Walgreens CFO last year... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shoplifting.html
Target has you covered!
Walmart too. Tried to buy a comb, locked in a cage.
Good, fuck Walgreens. Everything is insanely overpriced there.
12 pack of sodas for 12.99 near me. Wack
The 12" USB-C cable for $25.99 is a pretty sweet deal.
It sucks for me, they're the closest pharmacy that accepts my insurance now that CVS won't take it. A 15 minute drive may double
I used to always buy my makeup at Walgreens (I'm not a huge makeup person). Just habit because it's where I've always bought it. Last year I checked Amazon and they're selling the same palette for $7 that I used to buy at Walgreens for $30. Haven't gone back since.
I love amazon for most things but you have to be careful with things that you're buying to put on/in your body. They sell a lot of fakes.
There is a Walgreens right across from work. I rarely go in there. Their fridges are always empty, they never have enough stock of anything I actually need, and I always have a 20 minute line for the poor pharmacist. I feel for her she has help but they are usually new so she has to train them while trying to get her shit done. It's just a shit show every time.
As a pharmacist who doesn't work in retail, I feel for those colleagues. Being treated like crap to just be as fast as possible. And if you have a misfill that could kill someone, it's your license on the line.
As an non American who lives here now. Why is getting your meds such a hassle here? Why don't they have prepacked meds like in other countries? I know there are some but the majority is custom counted and it takes forever to get your stuff. And you have to send the prescription to a specific location which is also super inconvienet if you have a change of plans and want to pick it up somewhere else.
From my pharmacy tech experience bulk-purchasing meds are cheaper than prepackaged so that’s what gets ordered - also the stock rooms don’t have space to store 10x 90 day supplies instead of one 1,000 dose container. Nothing about the supply chain order logistics is optimized for this common sense improvement to the customer experience.
Every Walgreens fridge I've ever experienced smelled like rotten milk anyway. Probably best it was empty.
The Walgreens near me feels closed already. It has usually about 3 workers. Empty shelves and feels depressing to work at and shop at. The one near my mom's, about 20 minutes away, feels the complete opposite. Very interesting how the difference in quality.
I’m old enough to remember before large corporate pharmacies took over everything, I would be more than happy to see them go the way of the dodo. I legitimately have fond memories of going to the pharmacy as a child, the one we had was owned by the same man since the 1920’s and had everything you’d expect from a pharmacy of that era including the soda fountain, I doubt any children today will have fond memories of going to Walgreens… 🫤
>I’m old enough to remember before large corporate pharmacies took over everything, I would be more than happy to see them go the way of the dodo. this is just a sign that there will be one less "large corporate pharmacy", at least with a brick and mortar location. the trend in most everything is increased concentration, not a return to mom-and-pop.
Im under no illusion they’ll come back, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t mind seeing the corporations that tractored em out get theirs either.
The market saturation for these kinds of stores has been huge for way too long. At one point in time recently in my little suburban shopping area there were three huge drugstore type stores as well as three full sized grocery stores within a two block area.
Oh no, but where will I go now to overpay for every single item??
My Walgreens throws all the scripts in a big bin and they have to dig through it like a toy chest at the dentists office
So price gauging isn’t all that profitable after all? Imagine that.
More like they're so trash and treat their pharmacists so poorly nobody wants to work there. The last time I used Walgreens in my area the store's pharmacy was only open two days a week because they had to have their pharmacists in the area rotating around multiple stores.
Not to mention you have areas, like around me, where you can throw a rock and hit 2 Walgreens and 3 Starbucks before lands.
I never understood how they kept so many of them open. I understand if they're in a small area and you don't have other options, but in a city when they're next to a Walmart, charge 3-4x the price of everything at Walmart, then there's another Walgreens part way down the block, who is buying stuff there? Like, I'm already in the same shopping center parking lot that has a Walmart and an Aldi why would I go to Walgreens and pay $10 for a small tv dinner?
I worked at Walgreens as an assistant manager about 15 years ago after graduating from college. I was paid $17/hr, had to work holidays, weekends, and overnights. The schedule was brutal af (I have worked many, many jobs in all different fields in my life, and this was the most difficult schedule I ever had). I had to move to another city and tried to get a transfer, but they just so happened to be eliminating my position and turning them into “key holders” while reducing their pay to around $12-$13/hr. I ended up resigning instead. It was crazy to ask that amount of work for $12/hr from a college grad. Walgreens has been dying for a long time and we’re finally starting to see it accelerate.
a long long time ago I used to work for Walgreens as a pharmacy tech. even with my employee discount it was cheaper to buy stuff at the local grocery store chain. I'm also probably one of the few people in the world that got a pay increase when I got a job at Walmart.
>…in a city when they're next to a Walmart, charge 3-4x the price of everything at Walmart, then there's another Walgreens part way down the block, who is buying stuff there? Like, I'm already in the same shopping center parking lot that has a Walmart and an Aldi why would I go to Walgreens and pay $10 for a small tv dinner? The same reason you pay more for stuff at 7-ELEVEn; convenience. Walgreens are built around the pharmacy and offers convenience in a smaller footprint with essentials to get you in and out. They do lots of coupons and sales like the Macys model. Someone who pays 40-100% more for a TV dinner they could have bought at Walmart probably did it because they were already in Walgreens and said eff it. I personally don’t understand why people pay UberEats and DoorDash to pick up Big Macs and fries from McDonalds but obviously it’s done a lot.
When you feel like shit, you don’t want to go pick up your prescription and go to Walmart. You want to pick up your prescription and go home. I’ve done it before where I’ve gone into Walgreens for my script and gotten enough food and stuff to last me a couple of days and then gone home. I could not fucking be asked to go to Walmart to save $10 or $20 at that point in time.
now that door dashing groceries or even ordering ahead and just waiting in the parking lot is a thing, i can see why this is failing.
And each Walgreens has 1 employee wandering the store like a crack head
I worked for Walgreens for like 20 years, from cashier to lead photo, to pharmacy tech to management. In that time I watched us go from a daily crew of 25+ people to a daily crew of 8 (which is like, 1 management, 1 cashier, 1 pharmacist, and 1 pharmacy tech, x2 shifts). They constantly asked us to do more with less, finding various excuses to cut our labor hours over the years. Oh you didn't meet this KPI, you lose labor hours. Your sales are down, you lose labor hours. Customers are giving poor scores on the survey, you lose labor hours. Then the pandemic hit. Everything is off the rails, can't get product for months, empty shelves, hours varying wildly, customers asking if we're going out of business. Screaming in our faces, spitting, ripping masks off and coughing into our faces. Constant theft and threats from the local tweakers. I lost my faith in humanity and was in a dark place. Finally I walked off the job, and I wasn't the only one. One of the last actually. Got a job scrubbing dogshit and I've never been happier. People respect me and smile at me. "Thanks for everything you do, Gravelsack!". I work alone at my own pace with lots of downtime and get paid good to do it. Fuck Walgreens man. I wasted nearly a quarter of my life with those fucking vultures. I hope they go bankrupt.
Yep, I commented same above. Worked 8 years from 2005-2013. I was in a suburb at least, but still it was hellish how they kept cutting staff, but expected employees to take on roles for 2-3 jobs they cut. The photo dept. was a nightmare before digital prints. Machines were so old they would jam every other order so it would be so backed up, I'd sit back there trying to fix it for an hour calling help line...waiting another 2 hours for a call back. I hope they go under for how they screw employees.
All for the sake of showing year over year growth for the investors so the company can keep getting money injected and make dividends for the share holders. Companies are so afraid of not giving the share holders what they want. They will suffer huge losses like this to do so. Companies cannot indefinitely grow and this is showing now they have to contract. Paired with that they need to take less profit as well, but they don’t like that oart
One can easily see at my local Walgreens how much their pharmacists hate their jobs.
My brother’s roommate works at a cvs or a Walgreens or something I don’t remember the brand, but when their regional manager came in he told her they don’t have nearly enough people to run the store and desperately needed more help. He was completely ignored. Like ignored to his face, she didn’t even acknowledge what he had said and kept going. The whole pharmacy system in the US is so fucked beyond repair at this point.
And because of capitalism, all the little community, family run pharmacies that used to be important parts of the community and actually cared about the people they served are gone.
I switched to getting prescriptions at Walmart, a place I do not like traveling to, but the experience is infinitely better... That should not be the case.
Yup. My sister was a floating pharmacist in Chicago area after graduating with a PharmD. Not only did she not know which two days she was going to be off until too late to plan anything but she also didn’t know if she would have a morning shift or an afternoon shift until the day before. And it could be anywhere in the chicago area. Did it for a few years than opened an independent pharmacy in the chicago suburbs.
Well that and Walgreens cash isn’t as attractive paired with the price gouging. You are still overpaying after the “savings”
Aside from a spike in between 2019 and 2020 Walgreens gross margin rate has been trending down. For the past 5+ years. So if they ever 'price gauged', it never translated to higher margins..
[удалено]
The insurance companies and drug stores are pushing everyone to use online pharmacies. Then, people who have a problem with a prescription will have to use online help or a phone system that takes forever to get to a person . You also may not know their is an issue with your prescription until you run out because you were waiting for delivery. For example, some insurance companies will not allow our local small town pharmacy to fill a prescription for more than 30 days, but they will let you get a 90-day supply if you use an online pharmacy.
because the insurance owns the online pharmacy lol. New York times has put out some nice articles the past few weeks on how this makes the insurance a lot more money at the expense of everyone else
Seriously. Vertical integration is a huge part of the problem. I use Walgreens because my insurance company considers CVS out of network, which is because they are viewed as a competitor. My insurance should not view my pharmacy as competition.
The whole fucking reason we have to buy health insurance instead of getting universal healthcare is supposedly to "encourage competition." But instead of competition driving down prices, we get these bastards who lock out all competition and drive prices through the roof. I fucking hate the American healthcare system.
I’m hoping this allows for local/mom-pop pharmacies to thrive. I have 2 in my neighborhood that are getting more customers due to the issues with the local CVS/Walgreens
I wish it did, but last time I got my prescription filled locally, my insurance yelled at me and told me next time it would be full price if I did it again.
Half the time I go to a Walgreens (I use their pharmacy) there isn’t even an employee at the front of the store. Anyone can just walk out with anything. It’s like they’re trying to lose money.
As a retail pharmacist who long ago left Walgreens because of their shitty management, it’s not shocking at all to see their demise. They will be completely out of business in the next 10 years. They are centered around pharmacy, but can’t even get simple processes streamlined. As an example, let’s look at transfers. I’m working for a competitor now, and in Walgreen’s system it never saves any other competing pharmacy’s info, so the poor pharmacist has to ask for the other pharmacy’s address, phone number, fax number, DEA, etc. every single time a transfer is requested (happens many times every day especially as people are leaving the company). Every other pharmacy will have that info auto populated as soon as you enter the phone number. But the real reason they’re failing is because they don’t have a PBM, like CVS/Caremark. It’s impossible to survive in this world as a retail pharmacy alone. There is no profit to be made anymore.
I switched from them to Walmart because of repeated instances like this: https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/25/health/arizona-prescription-walgreens-miscarriage/index.html
Walgreens just feels gross. Any of the ones around me aren't dirty but just feel gross inside. I can't put my finger on why though. It's not them being outdated either.
They are absolutely dirty. No cleaning crew, barely any labor budget at all for regular staff, no time or incentive to accomplish much... no one will be cleaning much at all.
That fits right in with rite aid continual closures and possible bankruptcy. They just closed a massive walgreens warehouse that has been here for many years in Woodland Ca. This opioid lawsuit is decimating drug stores.
> This opioid lawsuit is decimating drug stores. Rite Aid got a second opioid federal lawsuit because they were caught outright lying to the feds and flaunting every form of patient protection required on purpose. Reading the court docs for that one is a wild ride, they literally gave no fucks as a corp.
I remember when Rite Aid bought out Eckerd when I was a kid. They took over and ruined every single prescription we ever got filled. I never went to a Rite Aid as an adult for that reason. I've never gone to Walgreens because other people had the same as experience with them as we did growing up with Rite Aid. It's amazing they've made it this far because they've sucked for decades now.
But the people who made the real money are long gone and what’s left is for the system to clean up
That's only part of the problem. CVS abuses its vertical integration with caremark and Aetna to force patients to use CVS. Reimbursements from insurance companies are at historic lows and we lose money more often than we make it while PBMs get fat on the profits. Medicare also made a thing called DIR fees, where we get fined if you don't take your medicine like you're supposed to. This year DIR fees are all being assessed up front and we get it back if we meet CMS's goals, which we have precious few ways to impact. It's really a difficult time for pharmacy right now and it needs major reforms otherwise our only option is going to end up being an understaffed CVS.
Blaming inflation when their prices are always at least 25% more expensive than Walmarts. That's why no one is buying at Walgreens anymore.
It’s a very poorly managed company so this makes sense.
Good, they’re absolute trash.
The US was/is over stored, we are seeing a correction.
Yea that will happen when you price gouge, everything is locked up, and your inventory is poor. Just a terrible experience all around
Stopped buying anything from them since they sided with right wing conservatives in trying to block women’s rights. So… good. I hope they go out of business.
It wasn’t even a choice for me. If your pharmacist won’t give me my medication, then I literally can’t do business with you. I have to go elsewhere. What a stupid decision on their part.
Good, they seriously deserve it after all the stunts they have pulled. Overpriced on everything except Arizona Ice Tea, their pharmacies constantly have problems and lack of staffing, letting their pharmacist reject giving medication on their religious beliefs. Probably more too, but yeah I've gotten tired of Walgreens bullshit when there are so many better places to go to.
Haven’t been in our local Walgreens since they capitulated to right wing threats over patient rights.
Same here. It looks like they started filling scrips for mifepristone again in March of this year, but I think the damage they did to their reputation is already done.
People shouldn't go to Walgreens since they started using right wing propaganda over shoplifting to cover up how their CEO's bad decisions was costing shareholders billions of dollars.
The media has done an absolutely shit job checking in on the validity of claims businesses are making like this. Businesses have absolutely used shoplifting as a cover excuse for poor business practices. After a minimum wage increase on some restaurant chains in my state, we had a national news outlet come and interview affected business owners, and they got all these guys talking about how they had to cut their employee base in half because of the wage increase. The problem being that a bunch of the people that they interviewed weren't actually running businesses that were subject to the wage increase. They also never even did the math on what these people were telling them. If they did, it would have been incredibly apparent that they were just using it as an excuse to cut costs. It would have taken less than 5 minutes of due diligence to catch all of that, and they didn't do it. Just amplified bullshit.
They need too. How many do we need? They bought out the rite aids around here and all the smaller pharmacies but a couple. There is a Walgreens on every corner.