There was a time when you brought your prescription into your neighborhood pharmacy and the pharmacist, usually your neighbor, smiled and said it would just take him/her a minute, and it did.
Those days are dead.
Today, this is what you see when you are trying to get your prescription filled at Walgreens. You are either fifteenth in line at the drive thru, or thirty-seventh in line in the store. Either way it will be a long wait to get to the front of the line where you will be told that the prescription you requested on line three days ago is still not ready.
What the hell has happened to this once great chain? They were very proud to announce that they were going to open three stores a day and that you would never be more than five miles from a Walgreens. Mission accomplished.
Today they have around 9000 stores in the US and are filling over 800 million prescriptions per year. Unfortunately they take up to a week to do it and they are surly, at best, when dealing with you at check-out.
The 24 hour Walgreens pharmacy we use here in Palm Desert was closed this morning when I got there to pick up a prescription I sent in Sunday morning that the online receipt said would be ready Monday at 10AM. The girl at the pharmacy counter said they hadn't started to fill it yet but that it would be ready later today.
The customer next to me asked the pharmacist if the new hours, posted on a sign with a font of 8, saying they would now be open between 8AM - 5PM was temporary and for how long? He said, "Oh no that will be the hours going forward." "But you're a 24 hour pharmacy, she said." "Not anymore, we can't get anyone to work here."
Just take a minute and go on line and type in "Walgreens pharmacy problems." Up will pop over a dozen sites dedicated to just allowing customers to complain about how bad things have gotten at Walgreens. Incredible.
The issue, it seems, is all across the country. It is a growing problem that Walgreens had better address or they will be in bigger trouble than they already are. It is one thing to be out of bathroom cups on your shelf, but when you start messing around with prescriptions people don't have much of a sense of humor.
To the corporate bigshots in Deerfield, start coming up with some solutions.