At Walgreens: the bottom line is the ONLY LINE THEY CARE ABOUT ?

I am sure that a lot of pharmacists are glad they are working in a “right to work state” … there are some 25 states with this law on the books..  Businesses can fire you for any reason – or no reason – without consequences.

Pharmacists have not been paid $35 – $40/hr since the late 90’s or early 2000’s. There was a period of time 2000- 2010 when there was a severe shortage of pharmacists.. at its peak they claimed that there was 6,000 empty job slots that there was no pharmacists to fill them.

At about the same time the profession went from a 5 yr degree to a 6 yr degree program so on top of everything else we had almost NO GRADUATES ONE YEAR.

New Pharmacy schools started opening and they were getting 5-6 applicants for every available pharmacy school slot. we went from 80 odd schools till today we have abt 140 schools…. and they are now graduating 3 pharmacists for what maybe 2 available job slots..

During this time, the feds increased the limit on what students could borrow for college and in turn the colleges raised their tuition.. so students were coming out of college with larger and large student loan balances… not unusual for pharmacy grads to have $100,000 + student loan balances…  of course when they started pharmacy school they were expecting to make 100,000 – 120,000/yr when they become licensed.

So now we have pharmacists – that all but the Pharmacy manager are lucky to get 30 hrs/week … so now they have a student loan more than many people have loans on their houses and going to be grossing MAYBE $60,000/yr.

So many of the pts dealing with subjective diseases and trying to get controlled substance Rxs filled and run into many of these newly graduated pharmacists with a whole lot of “book smarts” and little/no real clinical experience.. I would not be surprised for a lot of these pts to get “I’m not comfortable” filling your controlled Rxs..

But there are always independent pharmacists … where the pt will typically be dealing with the Pharmacist/owner and won’t be someone fresh out of school with the ink still wet on their license here is a link to help you find one by zip code.   https://ncpa.org/pharmacy-locator

One Response

  1. Every time this topic comes up I ask the same question. Why dont more people use “mom n pop ” pharmacies? i have gotten responses of “my insurance makes me use ABC pharmacy or they cant find mom n pop pharmacy in there area”. Then I always end conversation (with my self of course 🙂 is it legal for insurance companies to limit or tell you where you have to get your prescriptions filled? I still havent answered uh myself 🙂 or anyone else ????

Leave a Reply

Discover more from PHARMACIST STEVE

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading