Thousands of Walgreens pharmacy staff across the country are walking off work this week, alleging that poor working conditions are putting employees and patients at risk.
The walkout could impact hundreds of stores starting Monday and going through Wednesday, an organizer of the effort told The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the company. It is unclear whether any pharmacies have stopped operations.
Pharmacists, technicians and support staff claim that increased demands on understaffed teams — such as administering vaccines while battling hundreds of backlogged prescriptions — have become untenable and are impeding their ability to do their jobs responsibly.
“When you’re a pharmacist, a missed letter or a number that’s wrong in a prescription could kill somebody,” the organizer said.
In a statement to The Post, Walgreens spokesman Fraser Engerman said the company recognizes that the last few years have been “unprecedented” and “a very challenging time.”
“We also understand the immense pressures felt across the U.S. in retail pharmacy right now,” Engerman said. “We are engaged and listening to the concerns raised by some of our team members. We are committed to ensuring that our entire pharmacy team has the support and resources necessary to continue to provide the best care to our patients while taking care of their own well-being.”
“We are making significant investments in pharmacist wages and hiring bonuses to attract/retain talent in harder to staff locations,” he added, but did not provide further details. Staffing crunch
Employees are requesting that the company hire more pharmacy staff, establish mandatory training hours, offer transparency in how payroll hours are assigned to stores, and give advance notice when staff will be cut or when a position opens.
The collective actions, first reported by CNN, was inspired by a walkout of pharmacy employees at CVS locations in Kansas City a few weeks ago, the organizer said. Walgreens employees, like CVS, are not unionized, so the efforts came together on a subreddit for pharmacy staff.
Workers at both retailers share similar experiences, said Michael Hogue, chief executive of American Pharmacists Association, a membership organization representing industry professionals: Both are struggling to hire pharmacists and technicians because they don’t want to work in a high-stress environment with little support.
“We have a problem across the entire U.S. with inadequate staffing in community pharmacies,” he said.
Employees who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by the company said they are often the only pharmacist on staff for a 12-hour shift.
“There have been days where I worked alone or with [one] technician when there [are] over 300 prescriptions to fill,” an employee said. “That is not humanly possible along with your day-to-day tasks. As a pharmacist, that is verification, patient calls, vaccines, transfers, calling doctors, doing [medication management].”
The added pressure of administering vaccines has made it almost impossible to do their jobs responsibly, the organizer said. In one instance, a regional leader visiting the organizer’s store, as he was juggling thousands of prescription backlogs, told him to stop what he was doing and focus on vaccination appointments because “they give us better gross profit.”
There has also been an uptick in violence from customers frustrated over delays in filling their prescriptions or vaccine shortages, Hogue said.
“We’re having stories of patients coming in and screaming at the pharmacist and pharmacy technicians, violence … death threats,” he said. “It’s been really, really nasty and consumers are not patient.”
The decision to walk off the job is not one that pharmacists take lightly, but for many the action is unavoidable, Hogue said.
In a stressful or unsafe environment, pharmacists are trained to “stop, evaluate the situation, determine the circumstances around them and then take appropriate action to correct those circumstances so that they can proceed in a fully safe environment,” he explained. “So some pharmacies and some locations have determined that they cannot proceed safely without additional staff.”
I went to my local Walgreens for vaccines a few weeks ago. The poor pharmacist was run ragged. His hands shook as he gave me the shots, and he was sweating profusely. My speculation is that he was on some sort of uppers to make it through his shift. I don’t know how anyone can work under those conditions.
Wife and I took all our business away from Walgreens after Walgreens decided to stand with the far right and not provide em emergency contraceptives.
Now that hyvee pharmacy is becoming trash, we’ve decided to go with Costco.
My first pickup at their pharmacy today was pleasant af
I did the same and went to an independently owned pharmacy. It’s been great. The only downside is no Sunday hours and a half day Saturday but that’s not a deal breaker.
Support local and independent!
Our small town pharmacy delivers at no extra charge. I’m never looking back.
just for reference people… walgreens cannot afford to pay the costs of have a full compliment of their life-saving function of pharmacist…
but the CEO gets 1,500,000.00 per year BASE.
welcome to the united states, where the points are made up and none of the humans matter
I mean, 1.5m is a ton of money, but that’s not insane to me for a company with over 9,000 stores
I will do it for half of that. And given that CEO actions and corporation performance shows evidence of being independent of each other I will do as well as he does. You can use half of my salary to pay for more pharmacists.
No one should be earning that much money period anyway. It’s excess while those below you suffer. I’m sure their board members make a nice sum too that is beyond excess of what anyone needs too. Max wages for the top and living wages for the bottom that make sense shouldn’t be that hard. Everyone should make enough to live and punish those at the top for pushing these conditions with skeleton crews.
It’s insane. CEO doesn’t do work to earn 1.5m. They’re just 1 person. No one can do ten people’s work.
She also received $20M in stock, and $4.
5M in cash as a sign on bonus, as well as free use of a private jet and a yearly salary of $1.5M. CEOs deserve competitive compensation, it isn’t an easy job, but that’s enough to hire 163 pharmacists at an average of 150k/yr.Yeah, specifying “base salary” seems pretty disingenuous. It’s all about the add-ons.
The base salary is generally a small fraction of a large company’s CEO’s earning potential IIRC
How much would we pay the CEO for half that many stores but run properly instead of bare bones?
You’re supposed to be looking at the contrast not the number of zeros at the top.
Removed by mod
No that’s the argument you’re attempting to shove into my mouth so that you can laugh when it’s falling out and feel like I’ve agreed with you. But I don’t, and I believe your argument is disingenuous for the sake of winning. As such, there’s no need to continue it.
What argument are you making then? Be very clear, because a CEO making $1.5m base salary per year seems trivial for a company as large was Walgreens. It’s much lower than I would’ve expected TBH
Just because it’s lower than average doesn’t mean it’s not still too fucking high, don’t pretend you’re too thick to get that’s the point
That really doesn’t seem too high to me, in all honesty. What would you think is a good yearly wage for a Walgreens CEO? According to Walgreens themselves, they employ 225,000 people. Imagine we get rid of the CEO entirely and distribute their pay to all of the workers (communism, yay), each Walgreens workers gets an extra… six bucks… per year. That’s not really the issue you make it out to be
I had to double check that my boozed up vision didn’t loose a couple zeros. Fuck CEOs across the board, hell, “C-suite” in general, but 1.5m is about the lowest I’ve heard for a CEO.
That said, their decisions are generally the real reason to hate on the Cs. The gap in pay is the hate cherry on top.
Edit: I’m reminded that base salary is a pretty lame comparator after reading another comment. Total compensation package is worth taking about.
I’m tired of you argumentative little cucks telling me when to “be clear”, and to what extent they would like clarity… I’ll be as obfuscated as I like thanks, as is my purview. I owe you precisely nothing lmao 👍
If you can’t tell what argument I’m making then why are you so keen on arguing against it? Oh that’s right because you’re a dopamine addicted fuck who needs to win at (anything).
Cope, seethe, and die late lmao that’s the kind of angry hands response I expected
It’s low to you because we’ve normalized these exorbitant base salaries and insane options ($20M or whatever). It wasn’t always like this.
So again… the contrast comes to light. Very succinctly stated.
Really what we need to be focusing on is the profit of the company. If the CEO makes $1.5M, sure that sucks but redirecting that to all the pharmacy staff (guessing 27K people) would net them only $55/year extra. Instead, what are their profits as that should be better distributed among the employees.
How is it not insane? It’s not like they’re personally overseeing all those stores. And it sounds like they’re running the company into the ground. I’d take that job for a lot less money and probably be better at it.
This is wild. My family and I just had vaccines done at Walgreens on Friday. The lady who did the vaccination quite nearly fucked up and gave my son an adult dose. She caught herself and pulled it out before injecting, but it was a near thing. It was quite obvious that she was completely rushing everything and was completely overwhelmed.
should be interesting to see what the fallout of this is… there’s probably no way management can bring in thousands of new pharmacy techs immediately - there’s a 6 year minimum lead time.
For pharmacists, not techs
They dont have to train them. They need to add 30-50k to their current job offers and open up +1 role at each store, and hire 2 people so there is coverage for all of them to take 2 days off/week. Once they do that at all their stores, ill believe them.
eh… quite a bit of training/schooling is going to be required to permit people to fill prescriptions. ok yeah it’s just “weigh pills, put in bottle” but there’s a lot more to it than that
No one is disagreeing on the complexity of the job. I’m saying they have a hiring issue based around bad conditions/low pay.
I’m sure Bidenomics will fix it. :-/
We’re still trying to recover from Reaganomics backlash.
Don’t I already know!
deleted by creator
I have been using an independent local pharmacy for a good year now. I can get a Rx filled in 5 minutes. Rarely do I have to wait more than 10 minutes. I take 8 medications daily. Only once did I have to wait until next day and they’ve kept it in stock for me ever since.
We used to have a great independent pharmacy. It closed down a few years ago. :(
“We also understand the immense pressures felt across the U.S. in retail pharmacy right now,”
Translation: We’ve cut our staff to barebones so that the CEOs can buy their annual new yacht and won’t hire enough people to man the operations.
I worked in healthcare up until recently. Our executives were constantly spouting those same phrases while cutting staff and benefits to the bone. They never miss a chance to screw their employees. Also we were chronically short staffed but they had us under hiring freezes basically all the time. By the time we could hire again everyone was so burned out most of our hires quit and we were back at square one under a hiring freeze again. It’s not “difficult to staff” it’s difficult to staff when you have to fill 20 positions in 6 weeks or get your openings closed out.
ohh yeah we’re understaffed, but we’ll be hiring in a month, don’t you worry!
Sounds like IT in a nutshell too unfortunately.
The Walgreens in my town has started closing their pharmacy early because they don’t have enough staff to run it.
We have several in my city and you’ll randomly walk in to find that their pharmacy is closed in the middle of the afternoon. It’s been a real PITA to deal with since my parents are both elderly with lots of prescriptions that I pick up. I’ve had to drive 20 miles away to a different Walgreens to get insulin, spent hours on the phone trying to transfer stuff from one location to another because they can’t maintain their hours, wait in the lobby for an hour to get an urgent prescription filled, etc. I really hate their service but our other options are pretty limited since all the independent pharmacies closed down and their old pharmacy through BiMart shut down.
I experienced the same frustrations with our Walgreens, and thought that was as bad as it could get. Then my health insurance plan mandated that we all stop using in-person pharmacies and switch to this stupid mail delivery system. You know what’s worse than having to wait for Walgreens to open so you can talk to a pharmacist? Sitting on hold hoping to talk to the one anonymous random pharmacist Optum has on staff. Want to transfer a prescription? Having trouble with a particular manufacturer or generic? Good luck.
Every retail place I walk into these days is staffed minimally. One untrained cashier manning 4-6 self checkout registers. 0 manned registers open. Warehouse stores with half a dozen workers on the floor.
I check on my way in these days to see that they have registers open if I’m buying a cart full of groceries or if i’m buying products that require barcodes to be scanned out of a book. I stood at a self checkout register in Lowes the other day for 10 minutes because someone wanted a 5 gallon bottle of water, someone had problems scanning a barcode and I had a hand full of nuts and bolts. The cashier was about to have a breakdown. Costco has barcodes you need to scan for muffins. but us mortals are not allowed to use the barcode scanners, we are required to either wait out the shared cashier, or lug the 25lb item into the scanning table then god forbid put the item back in the cart, those two cases of soda you scanned might… you know, i don’t know exactly why they need those huge items on the scale. Nothing is making sure your cart is empty at any point, there’s no lane hawk. They’re checking receipts 100% at the door.
When I was young, I was sold that there would be robots and air delivery, This dystopian 1984 retail hellscape is bullshit.
Shopping is so depressing and stressful now. You can’t flag down employees to ask a question anymore, everybody has been handed the work of 1.5 people on a good day. These employees are spread so thin and it’s impossible not to notice.
I don’t use Walgreens but my local CVS is the same. Everyone in the pharmacy section is running around with their hair on fire. They have to close for 30 minutes a day to get a lunch break. And most of the time they are all still pleasant to talk to. I don’t see how they do it.
Same here, I do pickups at a CVS daily and always see the same like 3 people behind the counter, always running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off. It’s a very quick and simple task of just swapping my empty tub with their tub full of outgoing packages, but there have been days where I’ve stood there for 10 minutes waiting for one of the poor souls back there to have the 5 seconds to swap tubs with me. I always feel bad for them.
I’m sure CVS pharmacists/ techs will follow Walgreens once this happens.
Glad they’re doing this. They never have enough people working. I feel for the pharmacy workers.
My local Walgreens is always a 30 minute wait. It’s very inconvenient. Sometimes they close the “vaccines only” window because so many people try to use it to cut the pharmacy line there, which never works but slows them down even more.
Then they have people yell at them for taking a lunch break on Sundays.
And the occasional drug addict that verbally assaults them because the drugs are on a delay timer.
Great to hear they’re walking out! I recently offered to take a friend visiting from Australia to a Walgreens to see first hand how flimsy and shabby the US can be.
Every Walgreens looks like a store staffed by people who know that their boss wants to pay them less except it’s illegal. You can smell the exploitative labour practices when you walk in the door.
It does always have that air of one of a dollar store mixed with an urgent care mixed with that one gas station open on Christmas Eve at 11pm
Crazy thing is that Walgreens used to be a decent store in the 80s, but the stores have been staffed with fewer and fewer staff since the 90’s. Now they seem surprised that an 4000sf store can be run by two clerks, a pharmacist, and a guard that stands by the door.
When Walgreens started denying people abortion and/or birth control pills and whatever the fuck else I stopped giving them my business.
Fuck Walgreens.
When I worked at one of their distribution centers and quit within two months , I stopped giving them my business.
Same. I work right across the street from one. Haven’t stepped in it since.
Fuck Walgreens.
We used a pharmacy that was inside of the regional grocery store we use that was owned by the grocery store. They recently contracted that part of the business out to Walgreens. My wife got strep and bronchitis and got a prescription that we had filled there. They tool litterally all day to fill it despite being told it would take two hours. The only way to speed it up was to sit in a grocery store with communicable illness for an hour. They encouraged her to do that.
I got my prescriptions filled at a Walgreens for a little while. The minimum amount of time I was in the store for a simple pickup of a prescription I had been told was “ready” was twenty minutes. They were obviously understaffed, but I never saw the same person twice. I had to show them my ID and insurance card every time, and I’m not even taking anything that can be abused. After my fourth or fifth agonizing visit, which took almost an hour, I searched for “independent pharmacy” as soon as I got home.
The independent pharmacist knows me by sight, is completely reliable, and has solved problems several times over the years. Doctors and nurses usually say something nice about her when I tell them which pharmacy I use. I will never go to a chain pharmacy again, and recommend that others don’t, either.
