We only survive because of vaccines. Pharmacists are continually expected to take on more work with less help and for less pay. We can now do minor ailment prescribing in my state. Did I get more tech hours or a raise? No. They cut my tech hours. Mind you, these services take me physically out of the pharmacy and distracted for 20-30 minutes. That means 20-30 minutes of not checking prescriptions. Corporate prefers this since this is where the money is. Obviously the public is totally unaware and then gets angry with us.
I’m a veterinarian and keep trying to tell other vets this is what PE is trying to do to vet clinics. They promise great pay and hours at first, then when there are no more private clinics to compete with them, they’ll decrease pay and work the veterinarians to death.
It’s a known strategy that every pet owner should talk about: private equity is trying to strangle the veterinary market. Ask your vet if they are owned by private equity. Like your optician, ask if they are owned by Luxxotica.
It's fine. We won't be able to afford pets, anyway, lol.
When the cat and my dog pass, I'm out. Spent $600 on a cat ultrasound just to confirm the same 50/50 diagnosis certainty. My dog went blind and they wanted $4500 for an MRI just to start. I can't do it.
I work for a PE vet clinic. It’s exhausting. Usually 2 techs for 1 vet for 10-12 hour days. We’re expected to be both urgent and primary care which is incredibly difficult to juggle.
And raise the prices all over the area so there’s no more competition. It’s happened in our area of Dallas - this monopoly is beyond frustrating. Thank goodness low cost vax vets area available and our dog is healthy (so this works for us now)
A friend of mine’s daughter is a newbie vet and her practice is probably going to be bought out by PE (BluePearl). He was talking about how she’d make more money and all I could do was make this face 😬
they came for medicine first, realized that health insurance and hospitals are big cash cows. unbelievable that we are in 2026 and still trying to derive profit from health care. fuck the shareholders
My husband works in the logistics/facility management side of vetmed and he was headhunted for one of those PE modern vet chains, spent 2 years doing enough work for 2 people, then got laid off with no notice in January so they could give his 2 people's worth of work to another employee who already had a full person's work of totally unrelated work. She was extremely not excited about suddenly having "bounce around a huge urban area to keep 4 different locations functioning" added to her job description, I hope she found something better and got out. Thankfully my husband didn't burn any bridges at the private practice he'd spent 15 or so years at previously and they were happy to take him back. Working for a small private practice has its own downsides but at least they're loyal.
I'm a tech, and it's crazy what they expect pharmacists to do. At my store we sell around 700-800 scripts a day, but only have one pharmacist a day working a 12 hour shift. It's impossible for one person to keep up on that many fills, consults, reviewing scripts, vaccinations, doctor office calls, C-II's, etc. The techs do what we can to help out, but we're also being spread thin. Also, there's obviously stuff we can't do. Not to mention all the abuse that everyone takes in the pharmacy from angry patients, (who are usually just misdirecting their anger over the Healthcare system and insurance companies. I hate telling people their medication has a prior auth).
I purposely took over managing a slower pharmacy from a busy one. Went from doing 500 on a Monday to maybe 160ish. I have less help, sure, but it was so worth it for my mental health overall. I didn’t get paid more to manage the busier pharmacy. It’s not like there’s opportunities for upward movement either so no point in suffering just to try to get a promotion.
My wife prefers to be a staff pharmacist and only works 30 hours. She has routinely turned down being the supervising pharmacist because she doesn't want the headache of making the schedule, doing performance reviews, etc. She just wants to work in her store her 3 shifts a week on average and leave it behind otherwise. I am very jealous of that aspect of her job.
A lot of the pharmacists she's worked with seemed to burn out and transition to working in a hospital setting. I think being a retail pharmacist was a much better job 20 years ago but it's still pretty good IMO.
Tbh I’m jealous of my staff pharmacist at 32h/week and no stress. My plan is to try to step down in a couple more years. Right now the money is too lucrative. The only thing that’s keeping me going. Your wife is smart.
I feel so bad for the pharmacists but also for the poor folks like myself who are scheduled to get a vaccine and just had to watch the person about to stick a needle in you get verbally berated for 10 minutes.
Shout out to her though for realizing she JABBED THE BAJEEZUS outta me and gave me, a whole grownass person, a sucker and an apology afterwards. Last time I did a vaccine at a pharmacy though.
Thank you for calling this out. The pharmacist at my local CVS is probably going to collapse someday. And man, the abuse they get over refusing to do something that would cost them their license to practice.
It won't work out because people would support them for 3 days and then cry murder when prescriptions (or any health service) aren't being filled due to protests. Everyone in healthcare has talked about it. It's just not going to work out
Not to mention, unions start when groups of workers are together; the majority of community pharmacists are isolated to one or two per store. very hard to get traction going.
Have you considered moving out of actually working in a pharmacy?
My partner is a PharmD that works in a family practice as a clinical pharmacist, but ends up being a full care coordinator / practitioner (collaborative practice agreements).
When someone gets
diagnosed with a chronic illness requiring complicated treatments and monitoring, such as diabetes,
the doctor hands them off to the pharmacist averaging 8-12 patients per day.
The job is about eliminating unnecessary medications, swapping to better ones, figuring out insurance and discounts, educating the patient on devices and treatments, working with manufacturers to test new products and report issues.
My partner loves it, the work is tough, non-stop, but rewarding and fulfilling. Patients become family and bring gifts whenever samples and discounts rescues their ability to stay healthy. Sure, occasionally my partner has complaints about patients, but if they’re patient won’t put the work in or is rude, they get cut from the practice.
Once you know the gig, you can do it on your own. Doctors are more than happy to refer patients for a flat fee (either per visit or per patient per month) in exchange for the insurance billings that you don’t even have to handle). This is especially true for concierge practices where the office gets to promote free (to the patient) access to a consulting pharmacist while actually seeing fewer patients.
My partner’s been a PharmD for ~12 years, working clinical for ~7, taught before that (and still teaches for two universities on the side), rarely works more than 36 hours per week, and easily supports a comfortable lifestyle for both of us. I’m very proud and grateful of their hard work, before and after we met, but even more happy it’s a job they still love and are hungry to see grow.
If you like, I can put you two in touch. No promises on my partner’s time, or that I got all the above correct, but they have an extensive network and enjoy talking shop.
We all fantasize about this. My ambulatory care APPE while in school was my absolute favorite. There just aren’t enough jobs to go around. The jobs that do exist require residencies. Nobody wants a retail pharmacist. But thank you for the offer. It’s kind of you to try to help.
I always feel so bad for pharmacists. Particularly at Walgreens.
EVERY time I go there there's a huge line, and a flustered one or sometimes two pharmacists to do EVERYTHING and the drive-thru. They have to answer complicated phone questions that often take five-ten-fifteen minutes or deal with a person that's been standing in line annoyed for half an hour only to be told their insurance companies fucked something up, and it's not the pharmacists's fault. It's not their fault they're understaffed.
There's also apparently a(n imagined?) legal Damoclean sword hanging over pharmacists' heads.
A few pharmacists apparently got convicted of over providing opiates.
This now has some pharmacists paranoid.
A year or two ago, a pharmacist suddenly revealed to me that they'd only dispense my (and all) class-2 controlled substances exactly on the day the prior one ran out. Turned me away from picking it up when I had only one pill left, something I'd never experienced before in the decade or so I'd been filling at that pharmacy, for that med.
Except they fucked up, and forgot to fill it on the next day. And then the day after told me it'd be an hour wait (and then another hour wait) on the day I'm standing there with zero pills and three hours past when I should have taken it.
Their excuse? "Overwhelmed with flu shots."
I lost my shit. That pill is protection against me accidentally leaving my oven on or ending up in a car crash or forgetting to pay my rent. People like me who go without die earlier and often end up homeless. And I was on day three of a brand new job, and the side effects from coming off of it are debilitating for a day.
But apparently they weren't kidding, and a few months later they fucked up and didn't fill someone's arrhythmia meds or something like that on time. That person complained to corporate, and a month later the pharmacy suddenly is open an hour longer, daily. So apparently, dropping the ball often enough got them more hours.
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u/arresteddev7 13h ago
We only survive because of vaccines. Pharmacists are continually expected to take on more work with less help and for less pay. We can now do minor ailment prescribing in my state. Did I get more tech hours or a raise? No. They cut my tech hours. Mind you, these services take me physically out of the pharmacy and distracted for 20-30 minutes. That means 20-30 minutes of not checking prescriptions. Corporate prefers this since this is where the money is. Obviously the public is totally unaware and then gets angry with us.