This is my personal experience and opinion.
I worked for Rite Aid for many years as a pharmacy tech, and I stayed because my pharmacist was flexible with my schedule and we had a great crew in the pharm (I was lucky)
In my opinion Rite Aid has always been pretty tight with its spending, but these last few years they’ve really gone downhill. It felt unsafe for employees physical and mental health. They run stores down to the bare bones of staying open. It’s like they are going out of business but want to see how long they can keep a store running without spending money.
On a typical weekday, we would have only one pharmacist all day (they couldn’t take a lunch or break) one cashier (if lucky), 2-3 techs and a huge list of demands that we could never keep up on. Then we’d get nasty emails from corporate on how bad we’re doing because one of the demands wasn’t met in time. (I’m talking demands like cold calling pages of patients while you count meds, type Rx’s, help a customer at the counter and do a CBT training class on the same computer, all with the phone at your head) it’s impossible. One person can not do everything. You have to have more staff or allow the staff that is willing to stay longer get paid for overtime. We were always too busy and understaffed to get breaks but we weren’t allowed to have food or drinks in the pharmacy. I actually passed out once from standing for so long, my blood sugar just dropped. That was the main reason I wanted to have some snacks in the pharmacy, to prevent fainting.
Also, when you clock out for lunch, you have to clock out first, then go up front to have someone search your purse, wallet or lunch box before you can go to lunch to make sure you’re not stealing merchandise. That is time taken alway from your lunch and extremely degrading.. I wish I was making this up..
Lots of things in the pharmacy were old and broke down a lot such as; the fridge, freezer, leaking sink and all the phones. You can’t send a tech guy to fix them with refurbished parts forever, eventually they need to be replaced.
No one deserves to work under these conditions.
