The Future of Pharmacy

As a white male in my 30's, I have a good idea which products are being marketed for my demographic and which ones are not.  As I was cleaning the kitchen the other day, I noticed that M picked up a new dish soap:

For those of you who can't read the smaller print on the bottle, this product boasts "overnight soaking power in 5 minutes".  When I first read this on the bottle, my initial reaction was this:

Let me reiterate a previous statement:  I have a good idea which products are being marketed for my demographic and which ones are not (this is why M does most of the shopping).

If you read a any of my recent posts, you remember our ongoing bouts with random sickness in our house lately.  First it was the flu, then everyone came down with colds, followed by some good-time fun ear infections.  Well, now we're on to the latest great adventure:  pink eye!

Adler came down with a case of pink eye which of course requires him to get some eye drops and us having to quarantine/neutralize everything he's come into contact with since birth.  This also meant a trip to my local pharmacy.

Now before I go any further with this post, let's acknowledge something (welcome to the disclaimer, that's right, the disclaimer...)  -  I work for a company that administers pharmacy benefits (if you'd like to know more about what I do, check out one of my earlier posts here).  The company I work for also has a mail order pharmacy that is considered a direct competitor of retail pharmacies such as CVS, Rite Aid, and that W place (which shall NOT be named).  These retail pharmacies have been pressing our state and national government officials to pass laws limiting the consumer's exposure to utilize a mail order pharmacy.  Their reason:  It's causing the retail pharmacies to go out of business.

Um okay...so does that mean that Best Buy can go to Washington, DC and say, "Amazon is taking our customers.  Do something government people!"  Or could Microsoft go to their state officials and say, "Google Chrome is out performing our Internet Explorer due to JavaScript and websites not utilizing HTML 5.  Pass a law or something that makes people use more HTML 5!'

Kind of whiny and asinine right?  Well that's just what these retail pharmacies are doing right now in Washington, DC.  Folks, I have to say, the downfall of retail pharmacy is not being caused by mail order prescription options.  The retail pharmacies are basically choking on themselves by using a simple business killer known as over-saturation. 

There are over 60,000 pharmacies in the United States.  Is that high?  Low?  About right?  You tell me - in comparison, let's take a look at some of the top ten food franchises in the country today.  If you combined all of the McDonalds, Starbucks, Pizza Huts, Burger Kings, Wendys, Taco Bells, Kentucky Fried Chickens and Dominos currently in our country, that equates to how many pharmacies are also in business in the US. 

For those of you that prefer pictures, I made one for you:

Think of it another way:  By doing a search online, I found over 20 pharmacies within a 5 mile radius of my house (19 of them were in my preferred network).  So when I am craving a burger, pizza, burrito, fried chicken or a chai latte, I have several options and a variety to choose from.  When I need to get antibiotics for one of my kids, I have over 20 pharmacies by my house that ALL DO THE SAME THING .  So while retail may never like mail order, the problem isn't a different model for dispensing medication.  The problem is the constantly growing number of pharmacy chains in America.  With our population, overall economy and the government cracking down on fraud, waste and abuse in our pharmacy system, there are only so many prescriptions that need to be filled in a day.  Yeah, let's blame mail order...good luck with that!

Anyway, on with the post.  So as my family uses mail order for our ongoing medications, the one time doses of things like antibiotics are typically picked up through a local retail pharmacy.  To help convince people to stay at their local retail pharmacy, some chains are pushing the importance of the "pharmacist experience".  Now I have been going to the same pharmacy for years.  Every 2-3 months, we need some sort of prescription for one of the kids.  No one from my "trusted retail pharmacy" knows my name nor could they tell me which medications my family have taken without looking it up in their system first. 

Now don't get me wrong, the job of a pharmacist is not easy.  It's basically their role to make sure your overconfident doctor isn't trying to kill you because they have no clue what they just prescribed for you (try not to think about it...you'd be surprised).  They also do a lot more than that, but I'm not here to educate you on the multiple roles of a pharmacist (use the internet for something educational for once and find out for yourself).

So with my already biased opinion of the "retail pharmacist experience", the following was my latest encounter at my local pharmacy (NOTE:  Due to legalities, the name of the store has been withheld...let's just call it "Giant Red Dot Store with a White Circle On It").  So as I am picking up Adler's eye drops, I am told that I cannot leave (and be given the medication) until I have a pharmacist consult. 

To which the pharmacist pulls out the box of eye drops and reads the instructions to me:

First of all, we're just trying to get rid of some pink eye...we're not trying to prevent the zombie apocalypse here.  It's eye drops that go into the eye (still with me?), you need to make sure you keep using the drops or the problem won't go away, and for God's sake, wash your fricken hands!  It's not that hard.  If anyone out there needs to be advised on how to do this, you really should look into some sort of assisted living...preferable one with a shuttle service.

For those of you who don't know me very well, I tend to not have a filter on things when I get irritated (or angry/sad/happy/ambivalent/drunk).  So when I was asked if I had any questions, I responded with the following:

If I were wearing my "smart ass" socks , I would have come up with a much better response, such as:

Or even:

But the more I worked on this sketch, the more I realized that these poor pharmacists are required to do this simply because some dumbass did something like the following:

So there you have it - the value of retail pharmacy.  I hope you leave this post feeling humored and a little more educated (and some of you will probably be irritated...sorry about that...not really).

Before we go, I leave you with another conundrum on the theme of reading labels:  Is it important or no? 

I leave the judgement up to you...

-Cheers!