Jay Pee catches Wal-Mart peeping through the window
Slippery Slope dvd I want to take this opportunity to extend a hearty welcome to Wal-Mart. Someone from Bentonville, Arkansas has been lurking here at www.jimplagakis.com. As recently as 8:40 AM today, “walmart.com” has been with us, right here. Snooping, taking a look.
What is this all about? Do they want to get a heads up? A competitive advantage from reading what I write and what pharmacistS have been writing on the MESSAGE BOARD?
Hardly. They are probably thinking that old Jay Pee is a subversive and can harm them somehow. I know. Don’t hurt yourself when you fall down in a laughing spasm.
I recently installed “SiteMeter” so I can see what is going on at “JP.com”. I will make some big changes soon to satisfy appetites that I discovered have not been satiated. I NEVER EXPECTED TO SEE THAT WAL-MART WOULD BE WATCHING.
Perhaps, it was someone using the company’s address and Internet connection to look at “JP kinda Wal-Mart pseudo-porn”. I can see a constrained and suppressed pharmacist getting a thrill out of my kind of Wal-Mart wickedness and irreverence.
Wal-Mart has a lot of money. They are almost as big as a government. The can afford to put a full time position to monitoring “jimplagakis.com”, “thepharmacyalliance.com”, “theangrypharmacist.com”, “the angriestpharmacist.com”. The guy who coined the term GALLEY SLAVES when referring to institutionalized pharmacists, “theoleapothecary.com” probably has Wal-Mart snoopers watching him.
Scary, isn’t it? So, I don’t want to cause anyone to get laid off at the offices in Bentonville, but I want my viewpoint to be “transparent”. It always has been. JP has never been shy about telling what he believes is the truth.
Here we go. So you don’t have to “lurk” at JP.Com. If you are not the guy at Wal-Mart stop reading right now. This does not concern you, in your safe and warm cocoon.
WAL-MART IS NOT AND NEVER WILL BE A DRUG STORE COMPANY. CVS, for all of its faults, is a drug store company.
WAL-MART is WAL-MART. This company is opportunistic. If a pharmacist follows the company line, they can have a relatively smooth working life. A working life without dignity, self-respect and integrity. Don’t even think about it. Maslow does not make sense here. If GALLEY SLAVE is appropriate, it works here.
The $4.00 prescription strips the entire profession of the patient’s perception that PHARMACISTS PROVIDE A VALUABLE PROFESSIONAL SERVICE that cannot be obtained anywhere else. The $4.00 Rx is not a public service. It is a dingy marketing tool. My suggestion is that all companies leave it up to the pharmacist as to who is a “poor patient”.
That was the norm 4 decades ago. The doctor would write “PP” on the Rx. It was code for “poor patient”. I always, in 100% of the incidences, followed through with a retail price of bare bones acquisition cost OR LESS. The LESS usually came when it was a child with an earache. I have a thing for children with earaches. Perhaps because I can still remember what it was like.
The $4.00 Rx is a travesty as a public health service. To make sure there is no mistake. TRAVESTY: TO IMITATE OR RIDICULE SOMETHING IN A GROTESQUE OR DISTORTED MANNER. The $4.00 Rx is goddam grotesque.
Now, if you are a non-pharmacist Wal-Mart middle manager reading this, I am NOT talking to you. I frankly don’t give a shit what you think. This is to the pharmacist middle-managers, the “Yes Men” who have sold their souls just to look good to their non-pharmacist bosses. It is a sick kind of corporate incest. It is just as bad as Britney Spears French kissing Lindsay Lohan.
Can you imagine that first conversation?
Non-pharmacist middle manager, “Bill, how about selling some of those dirt cheap generics at $4.00 for a month’s supply?”
Pharmacist one-step-lower middle manager thinks: “What the fuck? That’s a terrible idea.” But he says, “Not a bad idea, Frank.” He thinks: “This has about as much hope as a fart in a tornado.”
Bill had his chance and he let the entire industry down. Let no one dissuade you from this idea: Wal-Mart is a very bad player in our industry. We need to shun them. We need to work somewhere else. We need to get some pride back and run away from a company that has harmed and will continue to harm the industry. They’ll throw money like crazy to get people to work for them. It’ll be on your conscience.
Pharmacists will eventually bury them. We will become the dangerous “Black Sheep” of the family. Wal-Mart will not prevail. Do they think they are dealing with high school drop out cashiers? Pharmacists will eventually win some small battles and they will get the taste of blood. You know what happens when the alpha animal tastes blood.
The only way they can continue in causing damage is if pharmacists continue to operate as free-agents and not members of a profession. We have a duty to our profession.
Do NOT ever expect WAL-MART to abide by published company policy if it will cost them money. If they can bully you into giving up, they will bring the hammer down. If you don’t willingly let Wal-Mart have its way, you are going to have to get an attorney.
A recent disability case in the Pacific Northwest tells just the way it is. A PIC at Wal-Mart wanted them to simply abide by “the book.” That pharmacist now has an attorney.
So, Wal-Mart man. Welcome to my world. What I wrote above is so you don’t have to hunt so hard. I would guess that many of my loyal readers will have their own comments. Try to keep it above the line, you who have your mouths full of profanities reading this.
Remember, if Wal-Mart can lurk at Jay Pee.com. They can be in your bed room.
25 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
I worked for Big Chain for a few years and Small Chain for a few years. Now I only do relief for independents. I felt I could not do this job the way I wanted unless I could sometimes tell people and doctors and insurances NO occasionally without it becoming a federal case. That means telling an occasional employer that they may rent my license but they can’t buy it.
Patients and more important than customers and I think the profession is more important than any employer. By telling someone they cant take Duract indefinitely, can’t take Propulsid and Flexeril, can’t take Oxycontin 4 times a day for example,I may be the first to raise the issue or the one who backs up a colleague who previously did the same; and I am protecting a patient and my profession even if I cost my company a sale or generate a complaint.
Shame on those of you who don’t have the skills to charge more than $4.00 for you services. More shame still for those who think what you do should be given away for free.
Jim, what about those little farming towns in Illinois where there was a previous general store/pharmacy combo. or an indy (no more) and now, only a Wal-Mart. Who will take care of those patients? Some of the Wal-Marts in those farming communities have been there a good ten years or so. (And, then again some of the Wal-Marts have just recently arrived and ‘taken over’ the main pharmacy commerce.
In some of those towns, I think there’s still patient loyalty and dedication to their Wal-Mart pharmacy crew, and folks would still bring their scripts whether or not they were charged $4.00. But, if there’s going to be one Wal-mart store that sells scripts at $4.00, the ‘program’ should be nation-wide. (So, what was the initial justification to the boards of pharmacy, state regulators, monopoly-busters, etc. for rolling out the program in certain areas of the country, and can all those grasshoppers be collected and stuffed back in the bag?)
Hey JP,
Interesting post (as always). Now let me just say that I guess I am not up on my tabloid trash reading b/c I did not know Britney was kissing LiLo. I didn’t think LiLo was kissing any girl these days besides Samantha Ronson. Brit shared some tongue with Madonna at the Mtv awards a few years ago. Wait-am I off track? Hold on, let me take the bubble gum out of my mouth so I can type better.
The $4 rx. Sigh. I am not so opposed to it as you. I have always thought it was awful that cash paying customers had to pay $19 for Amox 500 mg #21 when the actual cost is so low. (My parents have never had rx coverage so I think of this point of view, maybe more than others).
BUT… I think I agree with you in principle. I think the fishbowl layout of the pharmacy, the unprofessional environment littered with ridiculous advertisements and OTC impulse items does more to harm our professional image in the public eye.
The working conditions, the lack of a decent place to even counsel…well, it’s kinda my soap box. The pharmacy counter looks no different than the cosmetics counter at Macy’s or the counter at Arby’s. It’s hard to look professional in such dismal surroundings.
I hope Dr. Elliot weighs in on this. I love to hear what he thinks too.
JP, I think you already know how I feel on this issue…
The $4 scripts might not give the right impression of the value that pharmacists provide, but it does have it’s place. My store is in a relatively low-income area, so many of my patients wouldn’t be able to take their meds at all if it weren’t for the $4 list. However, we are also in a pretty high drug-abuse area (must those two always be linked?), and I was noting our AVERAGE of 84% markup of controlled substances just today.
I’ll be happy to make up the difference in my ‘value’ for those $4 patients by sticking it to the junkies….
The irony of this is everyone I have talked to whom works in a Wal-Mart pharmacy states that they have no direct access to the Internet while in the pharmacy. Therefore it must be a ‘Big Brother’ type program that is out to get you JP. Wal-Mart scares the bejesus outta me
I work for a chain that, thanks to $4.00/$10.00 generics and a couple of other tricks, is giving Mall*Wart a run for their money in this area. Of course, I’m only paid enough to buy my groceries and ‘business casual’ work wear at Mall*Wart, but I’m ‘just a tech’ and not that important.
That said, and keeping in mind that the profit from every $4.00/rx is divided unequally among the pharmacists, the techs, the store and the corporation, I still find that I agree with SickofStupids; if a drug’s manufacture/acquisition cost is pennies a tab, why should it *need* to go out the door to all but the truly destitute at a 350% mark up?
In honesty, what’s more irritating to me than the ridiculous behavior of our customers, the equally asinine expectations and demands of the corporate dictators that run our operation, the disregard of the whole field from MDs and other health care workers, and the idea that “a mere technician” is no different than the pimply 17 year old that hands out fries across the parking lot, is the fact that Big Pharma and “Health” Insurance are the Robber Barons of the New Millennium: they’ve got you, me, and every customer every one of us sees daily over a barrel and are enjoying every last drop they can bleed out of a system already weighted in their favor by fortunate and powerful bedfellows. Carnegie, Flagler, and JJ Astor must be sitting around somewhere chewing cigars and applauding.
My tabloid trash reading is very limited. It was Brittney & Madonna.
I want to make it clear that my problem with the $4.00 Rx is that the move was made as a predatory marketing strategy. It was not a pharmacist who decided this would be the way to go. It was some “locked away” non-pharmacist who has not the first clue who
DAMAGED our profession.
No one can argue with this: THE $4.00 Rx
dminishes (if not destroys) the perception that we provide a VALUABLE PROFESSIONAL SERVICE.
Just listen to these people. Now they want every Rx to be $4.00.
It makes me sick to my stomach, the work we have to do to repair the damage.
I know that Sickofstupidpeople has to turn her back to stay settled with some of these
weasels.
“Why ain’t my Norcos $4.00?”
It could have been someone who is a pharmacist at walmart has managed to break through the firewall and access your site from work. Probably not a walmart spy.
I’m on the fence about the $4 scripts. Having worked at an independent, I know that you can get short-dated cipro, keflex, and metformin for nearly pennies, so there is still profit. Many of the pharmacies in the area offer $4 scripts now. The one’s that don’t, for a patient that is having trouble affording their medications, will call around to price match one that does.
The area I worked in was a high medicaid area. We often discounted for cash customers,as long as it wasn’t narcs. Chains don’t have that option as much.
WallyWorld lost my respect awhile ago. I interviewed with them at a job fair in college. I actually was trying to interview with Sams since I knew the DM and hadn’t had a chance to catch up with him for a while. Wal-Mart’s guy started out by asking me if I liked cold french fries. He spent the entire interview talking about how he didn’t like cold french fries and that is why they close for lunch. He was very very passionate about cold french fries. I couldn’t wait to get away from him.
I just want you to know that I don’t think the $4 prescription cheapens the profession at all. Maybe I’m in the minority but just because someone fills prescriptions in a grocery store (where I get my prescriptions filled, by the way) doesn’t mean to me they’re not professional or licensed or whatever. To me they’re pharmacists who just happen to fill prescriptions in a grocery. The service is the same, the drugs are the same, the co-payments are the same — it just happens to be a lot more convenient for me to pick the drugs up there. And I like the $4 drugs, no matter who thought it up. I know pharmacists don’t set prices in the grocery or the big box retail outfits, but I also know a lot of poor people who can afford $4 but not $20 or $30 or more.
And you know what — most of us have shitty jobs and have to deal with asshole customers, whether it’s in retail or the corporate office, not just you pharmacists.
JP, I know I have gotten a slap on the wrist from you in the past over my “obscene” language so I will try to keep this post as clean as possible while I try to put into proper words my disdain for this despicable company!
What they have done to the profession of pharmacy makes my blood boil. I know “Jeanette” from WalMart will post about how she is helping so many people to live better lives with the help of the $4 rx…keep drinking the KoolAid honey! What about your fellow pharmacists? Do you ever stop to think about us while you are ruining our profession? Soon everyone will have to drive 50 miles to the neareast Walmart to get a prescription filled in some rural areas, because there will be nobody but Walmart left to fill them. Then what do you suppose will happen to the $4 prescriptions??? Are our services not worth anything to anyone? If it costs over $10 just to fill a prescription, how do you make up for all the $4 scripts? My guess is that you jack up the price on some other meds…how about $69 for a generic Flonase inhaler that costs us about $6 and probably less to Walmart. That’s right! That’s what they charge. Get a price quote from them on generic Zoloft someday…that will give you a good laugh - Over $30 for something that costs less than $3 for 30 tabs. Yeah, they’re all about helping people to live better…especially their shareholders. Trust me, they are not in business to help people out - they are in business to make money, and with this predatory pricing practice they are making money and killing off the competition left and right.
I am so tired of people expecting us to match their $4 pricing. Why not just give everything away for free? Anybody that works for that company has sold their soul to the devil. Do you engage in the daily cult gatherings and cheers in the store? Just curious.
Honestly I never gave a damn what the cut-raters did. I did my thing, gave good service, and then always made sure I had a little something on the side to bring people to my store. Of course I was an independent and could do whatever I wanted. I once worked for a chain for 3 months when they fired me. I just could not get along in a corporate setting. I wanted to do things my way and proved to management that my way made more money but it made no difference. I was labeled a non-conformist and that suited me very well. I went back to being my own boss and made four times what they were paying me. I do feel sorry for the crap that chain store employees have to put up with.
I’ve been thinking about this $4.00 rx thing for a while now and I have to agree with Jim 100%. It has destroyed any integrity that the profession had left. Look people, we are no longer “professionals”, we are mere “service providers”. We sell a product, not our knowledge and no matter how much you think MTM is the “holy grail” and savior of pharmacy, you are wrong. Pharmacists have been giving out “free” medical advice since the dawn of the profession. Why should an insurance company, or patient, pay for it? Furthermore, how can any company, besides Walmart, continue to not only sell dirt cheap rx’s but ALSO give away $20 in free merchandise with it? I’m sick of filling cheap rx’s and watching my career get flushed down the drain. It has to end. It’s no wonder other health care professionals don’t take us seriously. No doctors are offering $4.00 office visits or gas perks! I have no idea what the future holds but I hope I can get out of retail before it collapses around me.
No, IHATEWALMART!!!, I do not participate in the WalMart cheer, mainly because the daily meetings are held while I’m working, and my work is valuable, so I can’t take time away from it.
The way I see it, what I DO provides value, not what I CHARGE. The patients who value me the most tend to be the ones who can afford the least. They are the ones who, after I returned from medical leave, insisted on a hug and exclaimed “I’m SO glad you’re back!!”
You don’t KNOW me, or anything about me, other than who I work for. I have my own issues with WalMart. I considered another employer, but, to tell the truth, the bathroom in the pharmacy, the lunch breaks, and the fact that my DM is also a pharmacist are more important than some dollar value placed on my services.
You all realize that at $4 per rx you have to do 25-30 rx per hour just to pay your salary? Unless you’re doing 75 to 80 rx/hr you are losing your store and company money(techs,cashiers,computer time adjudication fees, time to counsel and talk to insurances, vials, printer paper equipment costs etc. …how long will they continue to pay you?
Just because the B-school grads running these companies haven’t figured it out yet doesn’t mean they won’t eventually. And the fact that they haven’t shoule make you question their competence. Telepharmacy and Central Fill are not that far off either.
OHHH you make it up on other rxs? So that means you’re overcharging some customers or insurances to pay so you can charge others $4/rx?
C’monn peeps! Any money being lost on these $4 scripts is being made up when the patient buys a crock-pot or microvave or even fricking shampoo. Every time I walk by the pick-up line at Wal-Mart I usually see other stuff in peoples baskets (I’d bet it’s pretty rare that a person walks into the store, goes straigth to the pharmacy, waits 30minutes to get their prescription and buys nothing else in the store).
$4 prescriptions is bait to get people into the store.
What I think you’re all forgetting is that in a business model such as Wal-Mart’s, the pharmacy is not there to make money. They make their money off the product on the floor (usually, this economy may not make that true at the moment). The pharmacy is just another reason for the customer to come in the store. It does take away from the profession by making the pharmacy an afterthought to groceries or toys.
I wonder if the PBM’s are taking a big hit
with these $4 rx’s. We have lost some generic copays in the $7 to %10 range to the
$4 rx’s
Hey Pharmboy - that is the point - I am not a loss leader. Pharmacy should be a profit center.
This is about that morning Cheer thing at Wal-Mart. I once worked for Sam’s club. on my very first day they said we had to meet up front for something like a High School assembly before the big football games.
Honest to God, this is the most retarded, dumb shit thing I have ever seen any business demand their employees be part of. Far as I know, you can’t refuse to go to them or to participate in this silly behavior. Grown adults standing around screaming at the top of their lungs “Give me an “S”……”
It sealed my fate and I knew that very first day I wanted no part of a company who demanded their employees be involved in what really seemed like cult behavior. TMRFTE.
just thought you may find this interesting…
http://www.boston.com/business/healthcare/articles/2008/12/31/stop__shop_offers_free_antibiotics/
NEW YORK - Stop & Shop, the supermarket chain owned by Royal Ahold NV, said it will offer some antibiotics free of charge to attract customers grappling with the US recession.
The free-prescription program covers 36 generic antibiotics from Jan. 2 to March 21 at all Stop & Shop pharmacies, the Quincy-based company said yesterday.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, offers prescriptions for more than 300 generic drugs for $4 a month. Target Corp., the second-largest US discount retailer, has a similar program. Stop & Shop offers more than 350 generics for $9.99 for a 90-day supply.
Compound Pharmacy has gained much popularity in the field of medicine. The medications are equally effective and safe for sick patients who cannot take the actual medications due to their personal allergies.
i think you guys are out of you minds. The $4.00 prescription plan is wonderful. For people like me and my sister who are going to college and working, we dont have the money to spend on our medicine and dont have insurance to cover it. I am thankful for walmart and their pharmacy. Oh and FYI, when i brought my medicine in they didn’t ask me about income or anything, they said the plans is for whoever wants to use it.
Wal-Mart started the $4 program because after a poll of shoppers, only 22% realized that WMT had a pharmacy and fewer actually used the pharmacy. Ron Chomiuk reports to Bill Simon (not a pharmacist). He runs pharm, optometry and the “clinics.” Internal WMT studies show that it costs much more than $4 to fill an Rx. The $4 is not below their actual acquisition cost however (product only). They strong arm generic mfgs. to not enable them to raise prices for products on the “list.”
Wal-Mart is an lousy place to work as a a professional. ‘nuf said.
can supermarkets pharmacies in new york use their instore 10 coupons towards for any copayments for medicaid and all other insurance plans??????