Thinkin’ About Going to Pharmacy School? Don’t Do It!

I just wrapped up my thirty-year pharmacy career a few weeks ago. It is not that I did not have a little juice left in the tank to carry on a few more years, it is that working conditions in retail community pharmacy have become unbearable. I spent my last thirteen years working for Walgreens. In that time, they gradually cut pharmacy staff in half per prescription. The company stopped raises five years ago, and all newly hired pharmacists are taking substantial pay cuts. Benefits are a shell of what they were when I started with the company in 2007 and the demands the company makes on its pharmacists have become impossible to meet… even for the best of teams. It used to be hard work, and I sometimes enjoyed it. Today it is just an abusive relationship where pharmacists are treated like indentured servants. Do you recall the old saying, “The beatings will continue until morale improves!”? At Walgreens, it is just, “The beatings will continue.”

Why are they doing this, you ask? Simple answer, because they can. Here is pharmacy history 101.

Thirty years ago, as I was about to graduate, America had a lot of regional drug chains competing for new grads. Most of these chains were bent on organic growth, expanding operations to accommodate an aging population. Insurance plans still paid relatively well, and the work environment was relatively healthy. Then the industry had a convergence that created a shortage of pharmacists. At the same time when small and mid-sized chains were rapidly expanding, the industry lost an entire graduation class of pharmacists nationwide. Thousands. Before the 1990s, the standard pharmacy degree was a bachelor of science. In the early 1990s, every school across the nation began converting to doctoral programs producing the PharmD degree. This added an additional year to each program, thus the equivalent of losing an entire class.

The basic rules of supply and demand are, if something is in short supply, the price goes up. If the market has a glut, the price goes down. Easy idea, right? Well, from the early 1990s through about 2010, there was a relative shortage of pharmacists. Pharmacy chains were forced to do three unspeakable things.

• Treat their pharmacists with a modicum of respect.
• Give them regular raises to retain them as employees.
• Pay sign-on bonus’s to steal them from competitors.

You can imagine the amount of corporate resentment that built up over these years.

Nature abhors a vacuum. As a response to the shortage, universities all across the country began opening schools of pharmacy. I suspect major pharmacy chains, like Walgreens and CVS, donated significant funds to get these schools opened as a matter of self-interest. Students flooded these new schools, lured in by pharmacy’s reputation for high wages and job security. By the early 2010s pharmacy reached equilibrium, and since then there has been a growing glut of pharmacists to the tune of tens of thousands.

By 2015 a second convergence occurred. Chain pharmacy over-expanded in the 1990s. Organic growth, building shops from the ground up, is expensive. Add in the rising cost of hiring and retaining pharmacists, and it was a formula for financial trouble. Financial trouble is the root of mergers, acquisitions, and store closures. Out of school, I worked for Fred Meyer, a company involved in five mergers and acquisitions since 1980, ultimately becoming part of Kroger in 1998. I did not like Fred Meyer, so I signed on with an up-and-coming chain called Drug Emporium, who was then swallowed up by Longs Drugs, who was then swallowed up by CVS, who closed my store. I signed on with Walgreens, a company that gave up on organic growth a decade ago. Their expansion over the last ten years has been through mergers and acquisitions while closing underperforming locations.

The overall net result has been a contraction in community pharmacy by about two thousand shops nationwide over the past five years. Add to that the growing glut of new graduates, and job scarcity with lower wages are the results. All those students who took on enormous debt, hundreds of thousands of dollars for some, on the promise of good, stable, high wage jobs, are now scrambling to find any sort of work at all. They scour the nation for job openings and end relocating to Podunk, USA for a mercilessly high stress job at 70 cents on the dollar. For twenty-five years pharmacist wages beat the pants off of inflation. $20/hour in 1990, a typical pharmacist wage, adjusted for inflation, is $40/hour today. Pharmacy wages peaked in the $60/hour range in 2014. The industry, nationwide, plans on rolling all that back. By 2025 wages will likely drop to $35 to $40 per hour simply because of supply and demand. New grads need to readjust their expectations.

There are some healthcare careers worthy of passionate practitioners. Pharmacy is not one of them. Sure, there are a few clinical jobs where the pharmacist plays a key role in patient care, but the vast majority of jobs are retail jobs that combine elements of urgent care and fast food operations. Today’s pharmacists are the equivalent of the finest chefs from Europe stooping to manage a Denny’s to make ends meet. If you are thinking of applying to pharmacy school, don’t do it. Your student debt will effectively make you an indentured servant and you will be miserable.