Thousands of Walgreens pharmacy staff across the country are walking off work this week, alleging that poor working conditions are putting employees and patients at risk.
The walkout could impact hundreds of stores starting Monday and going through Wednesday, an organizer of the effort told The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the company. It is unclear whether any pharmacies have stopped operations.
Pharmacists, technicians and support staff claim that increased demands on understaffed teams — such as administering vaccines while battling hundreds of backlogged prescriptions — have become untenable and are impeding their ability to do their jobs responsibly.
“When you’re a pharmacist, a missed letter or a number that’s wrong in a prescription could kill somebody,” the organizer said.
In a statement to The Post, Walgreens spokesman Fraser Engerman said the company recognizes that the last few years have been “unprecedented” and “a very challenging time.”
“We also understand the immense pressures felt across the U.S. in retail pharmacy right now,” Engerman said. “We are engaged and listening to the concerns raised by some of our team members. We are committed to ensuring that our entire pharmacy team has the support and resources necessary to continue to provide the best care to our patients while taking care of their own well-being.”
“We are making significant investments in pharmacist wages and hiring bonuses to attract/retain talent in harder to staff locations,” he added, but did not provide further details. Staffing crunch
Employees are requesting that the company hire more pharmacy staff, establish mandatory training hours, offer transparency in how payroll hours are assigned to stores, and give advance notice when staff will be cut or when a position opens.
The collective actions, first reported by CNN, was inspired by a walkout of pharmacy employees at CVS locations in Kansas City a few weeks ago, the organizer said. Walgreens employees, like CVS, are not unionized, so the efforts came together on a subreddit for pharmacy staff.
Workers at both retailers share similar experiences, said Michael Hogue, chief executive of American Pharmacists Association, a membership organization representing industry professionals: Both are struggling to hire pharmacists and technicians because they don’t want to work in a high-stress environment with little support.
“We have a problem across the entire U.S. with inadequate staffing in community pharmacies,” he said.
Employees who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by the company said they are often the only pharmacist on staff for a 12-hour shift.
“There have been days where I worked alone or with [one] technician when there [are] over 300 prescriptions to fill,” an employee said. “That is not humanly possible along with your day-to-day tasks. As a pharmacist, that is verification, patient calls, vaccines, transfers, calling doctors, doing [medication management].”
The added pressure of administering vaccines has made it almost impossible to do their jobs responsibly, the organizer said. In one instance, a regional leader visiting the organizer’s store, as he was juggling thousands of prescription backlogs, told him to stop what he was doing and focus on vaccination appointments because “they give us better gross profit.”
There has also been an uptick in violence from customers frustrated over delays in filling their prescriptions or vaccine shortages, Hogue said.
“We’re having stories of patients coming in and screaming at the pharmacist and pharmacy technicians, violence … death threats,” he said. “It’s been really, really nasty and consumers are not patient.”
The decision to walk off the job is not one that pharmacists take lightly, but for many the action is unavoidable, Hogue said.
In a stressful or unsafe environment, pharmacists are trained to “stop, evaluate the situation, determine the circumstances around them and then take appropriate action to correct those circumstances so that they can proceed in a fully safe environment,” he explained. “So some pharmacies and some locations have determined that they cannot proceed safely without additional staff.”
The Walgreens in my town has started closing their pharmacy early because they don’t have enough staff to run it.
Every retail place I walk into these days is staffed minimally. One untrained cashier manning 4-6 self checkout registers. 0 manned registers open. Warehouse stores with half a dozen workers on the floor.
I check on my way in these days to see that they have registers open if I’m buying a cart full of groceries or if i’m buying products that require barcodes to be scanned out of a book. I stood at a self checkout register in Lowes the other day for 10 minutes because someone wanted a 5 gallon bottle of water, someone had problems scanning a barcode and I had a hand full of nuts and bolts. The cashier was about to have a breakdown. Costco has barcodes you need to scan for muffins. but us mortals are not allowed to use the barcode scanners, we are required to either wait out the shared cashier, or lug the 25lb item into the scanning table then god forbid put the item back in the cart, those two cases of soda you scanned might… you know, i don’t know exactly why they need those huge items on the scale. Nothing is making sure your cart is empty at any point, there’s no lane hawk. They’re checking receipts 100% at the door.
When I was young, I was sold that there would be robots and air delivery, This dystopian 1984 retail hellscape is bullshit.
Shopping is so depressing and stressful now. You can’t flag down employees to ask a question anymore, everybody has been handed the work of 1.5 people on a good day. These employees are spread so thin and it’s impossible not to notice.
We have several in my city and you’ll randomly walk in to find that their pharmacy is closed in the middle of the afternoon. It’s been a real PITA to deal with since my parents are both elderly with lots of prescriptions that I pick up. I’ve had to drive 20 miles away to a different Walgreens to get insulin, spent hours on the phone trying to transfer stuff from one location to another because they can’t maintain their hours, wait in the lobby for an hour to get an urgent prescription filled, etc. I really hate their service but our other options are pretty limited since all the independent pharmacies closed down and their old pharmacy through BiMart shut down.
I experienced the same frustrations with our Walgreens, and thought that was as bad as it could get. Then my health insurance plan mandated that we all stop using in-person pharmacies and switch to this stupid mail delivery system. You know what’s worse than having to wait for Walgreens to open so you can talk to a pharmacist? Sitting on hold hoping to talk to the one anonymous random pharmacist Optum has on staff. Want to transfer a prescription? Having trouble with a particular manufacturer or generic? Good luck.