Pros
Safeway pharmacies in my are are offering 2.25 per hour to any techs who become APhA certified for vaccine administration, which is a significant benefit. For comparison, at Walgreens, they paid a 1000 dollar bonus to techs after 6 months of being authorized to administer vaccines, which is about $1 an hour during 6 months of full-time work, and then nothing following that. This immunizing pay is, in my opinion, the best part of working as a tech at Safeway. The second best part is that we don’t have drive-thru windows.
Cons
This is a retail pharmacy, which operates much like other retail pharmacies. The company is always pushing each location so hard to boost sales, i.e. setting unrealistic goals for sales of at-home COVID tests, Prevnar 20 vaccine, etc., and there are regular conference calls where each store has to divert time and focus away from its patients and workflow to explain why they may not have met the — often unrealistic — goals.
