Employee concerns are far from the company’s only fiscal problems: mounting debt, budget cuts, theft, significant leadership turnover and understaffing also cloud the picture, for both Walgreens and for its drugstore competitors. But Walgreens shares, down about 40% this year to about $21, are circling a 25-year low.
Walgreens, which delivered adjusted earnings per share of 67 cents in fourth-quarter fiscal 2023, down 16.3% from the year prior, confirmed to CNN on Tuesday that it will not be funding the “corporate” bonuses for the first time since 2020. A Walgreens representative clarified to CNN that only managers were eligible for bonuses at pharmacies.
It’s been a tough year in the industry in general as Covid traffic dries up and consumers move more to alternative prescription filling services online. Rite Aid, one of the largest drugstore chains in the country, filed for bankruptcy earlier this fall. There is also worker unrest at rival CVS. Its stock is down despite recent earnings that were above analyst expectations.But, for Walgreens, the cut in bonus pay comes just a week after the S&P downgraded its credit rating to just one notch above junk status. The agency said they were concerned about the company’s cash flow and its ability to pay down its significant debts.
I am lucky to live in an area where most of the pharmacies are independent with only a few Walgreens, CVS, Riteaid, Safeway, etc. Those little shops do not seem to be having any troubles at all. That is because they focus on providing core pharmacy services and do not waste money trying to conquer the world.
This should have happened a decade ago. APhA likes to talk big, but they shit the bed with their Johnny-come-lately behavior. They waited for pharmacists and pharmacy technicians to be in open rebellion before they jumped on the train and began making public demands. Way to lead from behind, Mr. Hogue.
10/31/23 – Message from Michael Hogue, APhA CEO:For far too long (my emphasis as APhA was in a coma for far too long, JRG), employers have made the situation worse than it needed to be. Supervisors who are not pharmacists do not understand the needs of care teams and make unreasonable demands on time-based productivity. Quotas on the number of prescriptions filled per hour or vaccines administered per day, or even time to answer the phone, simply fail to recognize that the pharmacist–patient relationship is not transactional. It is a special covenant—and supervisors who distill everything down to numbers and time metrics are destroying that relationship in the name of profitability. This must stop immediately. Employers should ensure supervisors clearly understand the covenantal pharmacist–patient relationship and that systems support this relationship fully. I again call on all employers to act swiftly on these issues that your pharmacy staff has made clear that they will no longer tolerate. The profession and industry need long-term solutions, and we need immediate action.
I’m also calling on CVS/Caremark, Express Scripts, Optum and all other PBM companies to immediately cease the assessment of DIR fees on retail prescriptions and ensure your contracts result in payment to pharmacies of at least their cost for the medicine they are providing plus a reasonable fee for doing so. You are breaking the backs of community pharmacies and are ultimately complicit in the workplace issues I am describing. Your corporate policies are unfair, restrict trade, and are causing the closure of hundreds of pharmacies across America. You are worsening health disparities and creating a new public health emergency. Soon there will be no pharmacies (chain or independent) in most communities to administer vaccines or provide testing for infectious disease.
No shit, Mike, you flip-flopper! I could have written this essay 15 years ago without batting an eye, yet here you are, walking into the restaurant at closing time expecting to be served. To be early is to be on time. To be on time is to be late. To be late is to be the APhA. (By the way, testing for infectious disease is out of our scope of practice and is just one of the many reasons we are rebelling.)
Workers from some of the nation’s biggest pharmacy chains, from CVS to Walgreens, have planned another “walkout” starting Monday as they continue to plead for better working conditions.
They’re calling it “pharmageddon,” Shane Jerominski, a licensed pharmacist for over a decade who is helping coordinate the latest protest, told FOX Business. From Monday through Wednesday workers at Walgreens, CVS and Rite Aid have pledged to call in sick, according to Jerominski. It comes on the heels of a protest earlier this month when Walgreens employees at 200 of its nearly 9,000 locations called out sick. Shortly before that, CVS employees in at least a dozen Kansas stores didn’t show up to work in a separate walkout.
If this is what it takes, more power to them. Big Chain Pharmacy needs big changes. The joke when I was in pharmacy school back in the late 80s was that chain drug stores would try to sell below cost and make it up on volume. That system has finally broke down like Skylab as its orbit decayed.
Walgreens has named a new CEO as pharmacy staff walked off the job this week over concerns that working conditions are putting employees and patients at risk.
Tim Wentworth, who formerly headed Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefit manager, was named CEO as of Oct. 23.
Walgreens Boots Alliance’s former CEO, Rosalind Brewer, stepped down in late August as the company was struggling with drug and staffing shortages.
The exact scale of the pharmacists’ protest was unclear.
Organizers on Tuesday estimated that more than 300 Walgreens locations — out of nearly 9,000 nationwide — were affected by walkouts planned for Monday through Wednesday.
Instead of supporting pharmacy staff for the past fourteen years, Walgreens has wasted billions of dollars on harebrained ideas. Yellow fever vaccines for international travel? I did all the training and never administered a single dose. Blood borne testing with fake technology from Theranos? I did the training and helped get the Oregon Board of Pharmacy to block implementation (which saved WAG millions in fines). Urgent Care clinics staffed by local NPs and PAs? A total failure that collapsed during the hysteria brought on by covid. DEI training that portrayed all white, middle aged men like myself as racist, sexist, crude, callous, and rude? I filed a harassment complaint with HR and a black fellow named Henderson said too bad, so sad. Pharmacist prescription authority for birth control and cholesterol meds? I refused and dared my district manager to fire me. Actually, I asked him to fire me because by then the job was so miserable all I wanted was out. He refused, so I quit, followed by every north Idaho staff member within a matter of months. Hearing that the Hayden, ID store all quit the same day gave me some small satisfaction. The list of stupidity goes on, as I have chronicled over the past three years.
Did WAG learn anything at all? No. Instead, Walgreens executive chairman Stefano Pessina (the 82-year-old Italian billionaire who engineered a reverse takeover of Walgreens when then WAG CEO, Greg Wasson, tried to purchase Pessina’s companies Boots Drug and Alliance. It’s a truly funny story except Wasson was handed a $40 million golden parachute when Pessina fired him.), turned the company over to Starbuck’s Rosalind Brewer, a woke token hire, who further ran WAG into the ground with more Wonderland insanity. Brewer did not even last three years and was quietly removed from her position in August of 2023, a story APhA conveniently failed to report although it was huge news in the pharmacy world.
And now conditions are finally bad enough for the indentured servants to revolt. It just happened at CVS, and now is happening at Walgreens.
Today Walgreens stock price is at a fourteen year low, a 75% loss of value from their peak, and is trading at 1998 levels. Everyone loses. You, the consumer. The employees. The investors. Why? Because instead of doing one thing and doing it well, WAG, just like CVS (trading at a ten year low) and Rite Aid (lost 99.999% of stock value for investors), are trying to be everything to everyone, selling it below cost and trying to make it up on volume while cutting staff. The question is: Can these companies finally be pressured enough to fix the hole in their bucket? Or is this the song that does not end?
Walgreens Boots Alliance reached a settlement with consumers who said the pharmacy chain misled them about Theranos’ fraudulent blood tests.
Walgreens will pay $44 million into a fund, which will be paid out to members of the class, if an Arizona judge approves the deal, according to court documents filed Wednesday.
The plaintiffs also reached a settlement with former Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, but were unable to come to an agreement with former CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes.
I remember when Walgreens forced us pharmacists to waste time training how to use these stupid devices. The idea was we would stop filling prescriptions and counseling patients, fill out a bunch of paperwork, go into the pharmacy lobby, draw some blood, and stick it in the magical Edison kit and perform blood born testing, all while real patients waited for their medications. So sneaky me filed a complaint with the Oregon Board of Pharmacy that I was not a phlebotomist, it was out of the scope of pharmacy practice, and pharmacy lobbies were no place for blood born testing. Pretty quickly the Oregon Board made a ruling that it was, indeed, out of the scope of practice, and it was never implemented in Oregon, and that saved my stupid former employers millions. I will be waiting for my bonus as though it is coming from Publisher’s Clearing House😂😂😂. It just tickles me when WAG gets caught doing shady stuff. They will never learn, though.
EXCLUSIVE: CVS Health’s “gender transition guidelines” for employees requires workers to address people by their preferred pronouns and names and that they may use whichever restroom or locker room they wish regardless of whether the individual identifies as transgender.
In the guidelines obtained exclusively by FOX Business, employees are told they may be entitled to a medical leave of absence “under the Family and Medical Leave Act, state law, and/or CVS Health policy.” Transitioning employees are asked to tell their immediate leaders about their transition so the company “can provide support and to make your transition as smooth as possible.”
“You may also wish to have appropriate medical care to support your transition, including treatments such as hormone replacement therapy and/or gender confirmation surgery,” the guide states.
“During and after the transition has occurred, CVS Health encourages you to continue to partner with your Leader and your Advice & Counsel representative, and to immediately report any issues that you might have with your employment, your work environment, and/or your Leader, co-workers, clients, and customers,” it continues.
I am sooooooooo glad I am out. Every few months these companies come up with a new and better way to make their employees miserable. Walgreens started pulling this DEIB crap October of 2019, when I was forced to watch a ‘training’ video that vilified white males while glorifying blacks, Asians, and women as perennial victims of patriarchal white privilege. I filed a discrimination complaint with HR, headed up by a black fellow named Henderson who, despite never having watched the training video, dismissed my complaint of racial and gender harassment. I retired a year later along with a mass exodus of nearly ever North Idaho pharmacist and technician from Lewiston to Coeur d’Alene. Lesson learned? No, I am afraid not. Companies like CVS and Walgreens suck as a matter of policy.
MANCHESTER — A scathing 40-page complaint filed by state regulators seeks discipline against Walgreens Pharmacy, up to and including revoking the chain’s license to dispense medication in Vermont.
The complaint alleges that the company unreasonably restricted consumer access to medication by closing stores without notice; that it failed to comply with federal and state professional standards; and that it engaged in “conduct of a character likely to deceive, defraud or harm the public.”
The complaint further alleges Walgreens “failed to comply on an egregious scale” with state law by operating stores without a pharmacist-manager present, including locations in Bellows Falls and on Canal Street in Brattleboro.
This needs to happen on a nationwide basis. Virtually everyone I worked with over my 13 years with the company have quit because of poor working conditions. Walgreens CEO Rosalind Brewer is compensated over 28 million dollars a year, enough to pay for over 150 pharmacists, and has done nothing to improve working conditions for her pharmacy staff. If anything, she is making it worse than it already was.
This is pharmacy reality – Please share it with as many potential pharmacy students as possible.
Most of you have heard of “trend colleges,” say for computer technology, medical assistants, pharmacy technicians, etc, and likely cringe at the thought of some poor kid taking out a loan for an education that is mostly worthless. These fly-by-night programs do not conform to academic rigors and standards of accredited universities and colleges. They simply part a fool from his money. This chicanery, this charlatanism, cannot possibly exist in major colleges and universities, who produce the great thinkers of our time, can it? A reputable institution of learning would never sell a student a worthless degree, would they? What about major universities offering advanced degrees in America’s most trusted profession, pharmacy? Surely, these very expensive and academically rigorous degrees will reap a financial and professional reward for their holders, right? Well, friend, sorry, they don’t. Not anymore. You did the work. You paid the bill. You earned the degree. The Uni separated you from your money, but thanks to the machinations of industry leaders like Walgreens, CVS, Walmart, and RiteAid (who control right around 30% of the job market), and pharmacy benefit managers, in league with your vine-covered institution of higher learning, the Doctor of Pharmacy degree has become an albatross of debt flailing on the back of a miserable, low paying job.
Once upon a time, pharmacy was a promising profession. The cost of education was reasonable, and the job market and pay were good. I spent six years at Oregon State University earning my pharmacy degree in the late 80s. The Grand Total – tuition, books, rent, and food – everything – came to $36,000. When I graduated I had a $42,000/year job (worth about $90,000 in today’s dollars) waiting for me. It was a good trade-off. Through the years I earned healthy raises and retired at the peak of industry wages. While Walgreens intentionally creates hostile work environments for nearly all its employees, at least the money was good, once upon a time.
Today, it will cost you ten times the dollars I spent to earn your pharmacy degree. Once you add in the cost of your undergraduate degree, you can expect to drop an average of $300,000-$400,000 before you earn your first dollar as a pharmacist. The academic inflation rate for a pharmacy degree is four times the US inflation rate over the past 30-odd years, meaning you just spent $350,000 on something that cost me $86,000 of your dollars, and you are bridging that gap with student loans. For instance, if you have student loans of $200,000, the service on that 10-year debt at 5% will be $2121 per month. Cheers, you lucky devil, you are now indentured, and your future employer knows it and will enjoy keeping their foot on your neck until you break.
What awaits today’s aspiring young pharmacist in the “new grad” job market? Not the job the sell-outs at APhA or your alma mater advertised – the job where you would collect a cool $125,000 a year – the job where you could actually afford to service your debt. Due to an irresponsible increase in pharmacy programs nationwide, 140 at last count – an increase of 30 over in just the last ten years, and the subsequent glut of pharmacists graduating every year, there are more pharmacists than there are jobs. A lot more. I mean, thousands more, and it is only going to get worse. It is like a broken fire hydrant flooding the streets with pharmacists, gushing out all wet, cold and desperate, and if you cannot find a job in the industry, your $350,000 degree is not worth the paper on which it is printed. You have no other marketable skills. Walgreens can smell your desperation like the nervous stench of a thirteen-year-old boy at a school dance.
Even a 2% unemployment rate for pharmacists is catastrophic, leaving over 6,000 debt-ridden practitioners desperate for a paycheck. Not to mention the underemployed – if you add the unemployed, under-employed, and pharmacists like me who simply walked away because the job sucks, and there are a lot of us, you will easily get a number at or above 2% if anyone cared to collate the stats.
The temporary surge in hiring and retiring pharmacists due to the Covid crisis will eventually collapse. Before Covid, every new hire I talked to had taken a substantial pay cut. Walgreens has managed to replace nearly their entire veteran North Idaho pharmacist staff in the past three years with cheap, new hires. A friend still on the inside told me WAG is currently offering $60-70,000 a year to new grads in the Portland market. The current pharmacist “shortage” is a self-inflicted wound by the industry. They, Walgreens and their ilk, treated so many of us so horribly, en masse, we took early retirement when Covid hit. We were already stretched beyond the breaking point, only to have the burden of Covid thrown on our shoulders. It was a painfully funny miscalculation on the industry’s part. They believed they could abuse us forever with no repercussions.
Number of Pharmacy Graduates by Year
While the number of pharmacists grows each year by 15,000 new graduates, only 7,000-10,000 will age out of the industry once Covid fades, and the number of available jobs is expected to shrink over the next decade by about 7,000. Think about that… an extra 5,000 debt-laden licenses a year, every year, for the next two decades. Do not forget, those 15,000 annual new grads have to compete against the thousands of unemployed and under-employed pharmacists already in the market. Today’s P1 student could easily come into a job market in 2025 with an unemployment rate of 5-10%. Think about what that will do to wages and working conditions. Big Retail knows you have no choice but take their paltry offer. This is one of the ways Walgreens plans on propping up is recently sagging earnings. Every $10,000 WAG saves in pharmacist wages results in a $270,000,000 savings the company can waste on their many harebrained schemes, like turning their pharmacists into mental health crisis counselors for store customers.
What awaits you, my pharmacy friend, is a job at Walgreens earning $60-70,000 a year, a nearly 25 year rollback in wages where you get to party like its 1999. A lousy, high stress, understaffed, hell-hole job, where the first $2100 of your paltry $3300 take-home pay gets nicked to pay your debt. That is if you are lucky. You might get stuck working a mishmash of unbenefitted part-time jobs just to make ends meet. At the end of day, you will see the real earnings of a minimum wage job for your first decade of servitude, and then you will turn a bitter forty years old. So, congratulations are in order! After all of your really, really hard work earning one of your university’s most difficult and expensive degrees, you will make about the same as the general manager at your favorite Denny’s Restaurant, only the Denny’s manager is not saddled with $200,000 in student debt, so they can afford a mortgage rather than moving into their parent’s basement to save on rent. A trucker with a GED and zero student debt likely makes as much or more than you, and already has fifteen years of earnings under their belt before you save your first dollar. Hell, if you are a USC grad (at the University of Spoiled Children, one of the biggest educational ripoffs in the known world, eight years costs about $700,000) you may never actually earn back the cost of your education. You, my friend, have just been “Trend Colleged,” only you lost eight years of your life instead of one, and Joe Biden ain’t gonna be able to forgive you student debt. You ought to sue for a refund, my pharmacy friend, just sayin’.
10/21/21 – Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) today announced it is expanding Mental Health First Aid training for more than 27,000 Walgreens pharmacists, while Boots is introducing new services aimed at helping to meet the growing need in communities across Europe and the UK.
Once upon a time, pharmacists filled prescriptions and were your expert on prescription and over-the-counter medications. Then, with no additional staffing, pharmacists became immunizers, primarily during flu season, but also year round with a variety of other vaccines. Then, with no additional staff, we became yellow fever vaccine specialists (thankfully that program died a quick death). Then, with no additional staff, pharmacists became medication therapy managers, digging deep into patient treatment programs to see where they could save insurance companies money by switching patients to cheaper medications. Then, with no additional staff, pharmacists became prescribers for birth control pills and cholesterol medications. Then, with no additional staff, Big Retail pharmacy volunteered their pharmacists to be Covid resource centers, providing vaccines and tests. Over my thirty year career, my prescription responsibilities alone went from 100 prescriptions in an eight hour shift to over 300 prescriptions in an eight hour shift with essentially the same level of staffing. By my last day with Walgreens, I was doing the work of four 1990 pharmacists.
Then, on a day when I filled one prescription every 96 seconds, administered one vaccine every fifteen minutes, answered a constantly ringing phone, spent time on a cash register, did patient intake paperwork, called my allotment of patients and providers asking their permission to tweak their medications to save money, called my allotment of patients who were late getting their refills, all while dealing with a lobby crammed with patients who did not understand why they all could not be first in line, I lost my cool and went off on a whining, disrespectful jackass… in front of everyone. That is when I decided to quit, putting in for early retirement ten months ahead of schedule. That was a year ago.
Since then, according to my friends still trapped working for WAG, working conditions with my former employer have grown steadily worse. The burden of Covid on top of all the other demands the company makes of its staff has brought them to a physical and psychological breaking point. Pretty much every veteran North Idaho Walgreens pharmacist has quit the company over the past three years. That is over a dozen pharmacists in five stores, a story playing out all across the country.
And now, with no additional staff, Walgreens is “training” its pharmacists to be “patient mental health crisis counselors”… as though they have the time to put a patient on the couch, pat their hand, and ask “how the long wait for services” makes them “feel” 🤣 🤣 🤣 A job people hold BS degrees, MS degrees, or even PhDs to do, Walgreens is going to force on their pharmacists with a six hour video training module. And the company wonders why these self-inflicted wounds leave them with no applicants!
I remember a few years ago Nancy Pelosi made the claim, “a glass of water with a D next to it,” could get elected in her district. That is funny, because California’s citizens, San Francisco in this instance, consistently vote for neoliberal politicians who bring this sort of chaos upon their communities. I am no fan of Walgreens, they are an evil organization who abuses their employees and embraces cultural wokeness, but the company and its employees have a right to expect to live and work in a community that is governed by the rule of law. When registered Democrats (Walgreens employees included) elect Democrat political leaders who cancel the rule of law, those voters are directly responsible for the consequences. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are all getting what they voted for… the sort of criminal chaos found in comic books and third world nations. San Franciscans just stabbed themselves in the eye five more frickin’ times, while red America sits back and laughs.
The only problem with this article is it is five years too late. Nationwide state boards of pharmacy, as well as professional organizations such as APHA have turned a blind eye to the horrid work conditions that evil-doers such as Walgreens and CVS force on the industry. I was a really good, efficient pharmacist and I made a difference in countless lives. For most of my career I practiced in the same neighborhood I grew up in and I always had time to listen to and take care of my patients, who were also my neighbors, friends, and family. With malice aforethought, Walgreens destroyed that just to make a buck.
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.
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