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echinopsis posted:What do you people think about something like a pharmacy? It has a more fundamental reason to exist than a department store.. but.. landscape still changing People get sick everyday, especially our rapidly decaying Boomer population. Pharmacies are something that when you really need them you need them TODAY and not in a few days shipping time. I wouldn't be surprised if there are less free standing ones over time but when was the last time you went to the grocery store and their was a full Gamestop inside? That is definitely getting to be more common.
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Aug 29, 2019 11:04
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hmmm here in NZ some cut price pharmacies that are not charging the state prescription fee are devaluing the profession. they can't afford service because of how slim their margins are with all their loss leading gently caress, I need to get out
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Aug 29, 2019 13:21
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Isn't pharmacy automation a really huge thing right now? It seems like the future is probably heavily automated pharmacies with a skeleton staff that basically act as fronts for larger online drug retailers.
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Aug 29, 2019 14:28
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From another thread, sounds like it isn't ready to go on death watch yet, but they are working their way towards it. Dr. Red Ranger posted:Fred's and Rite Aid getting bought out with mass closures, Walmart had a mass firing in the pharmacy department and restructured to single pharmacist per business day wherever possible, starting salaries are down in retail from ~60/hr to 40 and dropping, further squeezes forecast because pharmacy schools can't slow down pumping people out or they collapse and PBM's aren't disappearing. It's miserable work and it's only going to get worse for the foreseeable future. Rumor mill has Walmart targeting $30-35/hr for new grads within a couple of years, which is unconscionably low for people getting out of 7-8 years of school with $200k in debt and will have to fight for 6 months or more for jobs. I've been stuck for nearly 2 years as a PRN only pharmacist because my big blue company would rather hire new grads they can skin alive than someone who graduated in 2015. So I average between 10-40 hours per month based on how many people need to take a vacation or have to retire because they had a stroke at work and scheduling wouldn't help them find coverage.
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Aug 29, 2019 15:33
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Sounds like most college degree professions anymore. It wouldn’t matter as much if college was affordable but now it’s just a bubble waiting to burst.
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Aug 29, 2019 15:56
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I had to go back to retail after losing my grant funded NGO position a few months ago (animal related, not pharmacy) and my life is pretty much a constant stressful waking nightmare while I am at work. I am ostensibly management but I am essentially tasked with doing the work of three full time employees while also generally running the store while I am there, and being held accountable for what doesn't get done. When people call out (and they do, frequently!) we have no flex staff to call in as everyone we have is already hitting max hours or is too shellshocked to come in. When I express my concerns and frustrations about staffing to upper management they look at me as though I am speaking a foreign tongue. I am told beep boop you are already running at 97% payroll what more do you want. I lust for the sweet release of death. The only things keeping me going are a) the raise I negotiated for myself when I came back, b) halfway decent healthcare (especially since I qualify for my healthcare provider's MFA) and c) they now give ten vacation days per year (good luck ever loving using those though lol).
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Aug 29, 2019 16:13
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Paradoxish posted:Isn't pharmacy automation a really huge thing right now? It seems like the future is probably heavily automated pharmacies with a skeleton staff that basically act as fronts for larger online drug retailers. Most of the like retail pharmacies I go to have big robots in the back doing most of the work and my friend who worked at a huge hospital also mostly just supervised a big texan robot system.
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Aug 29, 2019 16:33
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DrNutt posted:I had to go back to retail after losing my grant funded NGO position a few months ago (animal related, not pharmacy) and my life is pretty much a constant stressful waking nightmare while I am at work. I am ostensibly management but I am essentially tasked with doing the work of three full time employees while also generally running the store while I am there, and being held accountable for what doesn't get done. When people call out (and they do, frequently!) we have no flex staff to call in as everyone we have is already hitting max hours or is too shellshocked to come in. When I express my concerns and frustrations about staffing to upper management they look at me as though I am speaking a foreign tongue. I am told beep boop you are already running at 97% payroll what more do you want. I lust for the sweet release of death. staffing is a huge issue in retail, and the only thing I can see fixing it is unions moving in and enforcing minium staffing.
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Aug 29, 2019 17:29
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Baronjutter posted:Most of the like retail pharmacies I go to have big robots in the back doing most of the work and my friend who worked at a huge hospital also mostly just supervised a big texan robot system. The reason this is even on my radar is because a friend of mine has been a pharmacist for the better part of ten years and she's constantly telling me that she chose the wrong profession. She's not the kind of person to normally complain about automation or jobs in general, so I've mostly taken what she's said at face value.
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Aug 29, 2019 18:40
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Going from $60 an hour ($2400+ a week, $125k a year) to $40 an hour ($1600+ a week, $83k a year) as someone in their mid/late 20s is not a reasonable life complaint. The problem there is not low wages, they're both comparatively extremely high. The problem is the $200k of college debt. Fix the college system, pay pharmacists less, charge poor people less for their drugs. Everyone wins.
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Aug 29, 2019 19:07
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Blut posted:Going from $60 an hour ($2400+ a week, $125k a year) to $40 an hour ($1600+ a week, $83k a year) as someone in their mid/late 20s is not a reasonable life complaint. The problem there is not low wages, they're both comparatively extremely high. The problem is the $200k of college debt. I don't think you fully read that: quote:Rumor mill has Walmart targeting $30-35/hr for new grads within a couple of years, which is unconscionably low for people getting out of 7-8 years of school with $200k in debt and will have to fight for 6 months or more for jobs. I've been stuck for nearly 2 years as a PRN only pharmacist because my big blue company would rather hire new grads they can skin alive than someone who graduated in 2015. So I average between 10-40 hours per month based on how many people need to take a vacation or have to retire because they had a stroke at work and scheduling wouldn't help them find coverage. That person isn't working full-time at $40/hour, so I'm guessing their pay is nowhere near $83k/year. Declining pay combined with declining and inconsistent hours definitely seems like a problem. At 40 hours per month the person in that quote isn't even making $20k/year. Edit- It's also weird to automatically assume someone with an hourly pay rate is working 40 hours per week. Almost everyone that I know who isn't salaried and who works full-time works between 30-35 hours per week. The only people I know who do 40 hour work weeks are salaried. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Aug 29, 2019 |
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Aug 29, 2019 19:14
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the US and canada should use packaged drugs ready for consumer like most of the world does, in Europe when I have a prescription I go in and out in minutes, in the US it takes half hour from taking out the pills from the main box, counting them, filling them in new one, printing labels, packaging.
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Aug 29, 2019 19:17
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Paradoxish posted:I don't think you fully read that: 40 hour weeks are the common average week in almost every professional white collar job, its a pretty safe general assumption to make. I did read that. I struggle to believe that most fully qualified pharmacists are only working 10 hours a month. If they were, people would stop going into the industry rapidly. The new lower salaries hes moaning about, for anything approaching a full time job's hours, are still shockingly high compared to what 90% of people in their 20s earn. It should be perfectly possible for someone in their 20s to survive on less than $40k in anywhere outside of San Francisco and NYC in the US, if they aren't crippled by hundreds of thousands of dollars in government debt. The problem here is his insane college debt level, not salaries in his profession moving from $125k a year to $83k a year.
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Aug 29, 2019 19:38
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Invalid Validation posted:Sounds like most college degree professions anymore. It wouldn’t matter as much if college was affordable but now it’s just a bubble waiting to burst. As always, it depends wildly on the degree, the field, and even the location. That being said, there are certainly fields where even trying to get into them is a huge waste of your career. Graduate school for the purpose of becoming a professor has been a terrible idea for 10+ years at this point, for example.
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Aug 29, 2019 20:10
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Celexi posted:the US and canada should use packaged drugs ready for consumer like most of the world does, in Europe when I have a prescription I go in and out in minutes, in the US it takes half hour from taking out the pills from the main box, counting them, filling them in new one, printing labels, packaging. I'm not following this complaint, it's been quite a while since I've needed to carry a physical prescription over to a pharmacy instead of having the prescriber sending the necessary paperwork electronically and the stuff is ready and packaged for pickup between when I leave the appointment and getting over to the pharmacy. Last physical prescription I had to bring in was also handled in about 10-15 minutes including time spent waiting for some other people to be handled at the pickup counter once the prescription was bottled.
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Aug 29, 2019 20:58
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Sodomy Hussein posted:As always, it depends wildly on the degree, the field, and even the location. This is what I feel everytime anyone asks my why I didn't get a masters degree. Like just why.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:02
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fishmech posted:I'm not following this complaint, it's been quite a while since I've needed to carry a physical prescription over to a pharmacy instead of having the prescriber sending the necessary paperwork electronically and the stuff is ready and packaged for pickup between when I leave the appointment and getting over to the pharmacy. It increases pharmacy costs with unnecessary equipment and labor time and allows for drug cross contamination, I have seen them handle pills with their own bare hands in both cvs and costco, and use the same counter that had just counted Oxycodone for my pills.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:08
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MiddleOne posted:This is what I feel everytime anyone asks my why I didn't get a masters degree. Like just why. Watching valedictorian undergraduate double majors with grad degrees get condemned to adjunct positions teaching two sections of English 095 at a state college, forcing them to keep their college jobs, is a hell of a thing.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:15
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:staffing is a huge issue in retail, and the only thing I can see fixing it is unions moving in and enforcing minium staffing. Yeah and the biggest obstacle to this is the fact that whispering the word union at most retail workplaces is a good way to get yourself fired.
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Aug 29, 2019 22:08
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DrNutt posted:Yeah and the biggest obstacle to this is the fact that whispering the word union at most retail workplaces is a good way to get yourself fired. And how! Believe me, I know. I know. On the other hand people were shot and murdered over unionization a century ago, so at some point something's gotta break. Anyways, I'd point out that the pharmacist pay is not really why drugs are expensive, and that walmart, for all of it's faults, does actually have some of the more affordable prices on pharmacy goods, especially generics. IT's like the one thing I'm happy with my benefits on, I don't have to worry about my medication costing me more than pocket change now. Paying the pharmacist less wouldn't really make them any cheaper, any more than paying all the hourly associates more in the rest of the store would make food any more expensive.
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Aug 30, 2019 00:27
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Sodomy Hussein posted:That being said, there are certainly fields where even trying to get into them is a huge waste of your career. Graduate school for the purpose of becoming a professor has been a terrible idea for 10+ years at this point, for example. Sodomy Hussein posted:Watching valedictorian undergraduate double majors with grad degrees get condemned to adjunct positions teaching two sections of English 095 at a state college, forcing them to keep their college jobs, is a hell of a thing. I just found a full-time job after being unable to find work for two years. It's the most I've ever made, but that's damning with very fine praise and the bloated cost of housing is eating up the significant pay increase from my last position. I consolidated my student loans federally years ago, and due to manipulating the system I am proud of the fact that I have yet to pay back one single cent of my student loans. Between a lack of job stability and terrible wages, I have saved nothing for retirement and have no assets at all. For three years in a row, I had to cash in my 401k just to have the money to relocate to another low-paying gig a long way away. If I paid back anything on them, I literally would not be able to live. I may end up in prison, but the system hosed me so I gently caress the system back. I don't have much to lose and I'll never be able to retire. Higher education in the US has become nothing more than another industry. When it crashes it's going to be something remarkable.
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Aug 30, 2019 03:47
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It should just be replaced wholesale with a public system.
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Aug 30, 2019 04:01
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Blut posted:40 hour weeks are the common average week in almost every professional white collar job, its a pretty safe general assumption to make. Stop championing a race to the bottom. Yes, people without enormous debts 'can' survive on less money. There is no reason to make them do so other than increasing the amount the employer can profit off their labor.
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Aug 30, 2019 06:26
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Paradoxish posted:Almost everyone that I know who isn't salaried and who works full-time works between 30-35 hours per week. The only people I know who do 40 hour work weeks are salaried. They work the salaried 50-70. They work the hourly 30-35. This is no accident.
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Aug 30, 2019 06:28
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I actually can't remember what the threshold is for benifits when hourly, but I think it might be 36? Or is it 32? Anyways, yeah. It's dumb and bad. I did have a supervisory position where I got that wonderful salaried 60 hours though! The OT was fantastic till I started having mental breakdowns from never knowing if I'd actually get to go home when scheduled or not! Labor is just kinda hosed up right now in this country.
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Aug 30, 2019 06:54
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My partner works on the overnight restocking crew at a big grocery store. They lost two staff members to internal promotion and the store just didn't bother to replace them, so in order to get all the work done each night, the team starts clocking up 1-2 hours of overtime every single day. After a couple of weeks of this, some beancounter in corporate notices the huge overtime bill and a new directive comes down the line: no more overtime for you, peons! Everybody is ordered to stop work at the end of shift, no matter what, and go home. This rule collapsed in like three days. Capital is squeezing the gently caress out of labour even when it's breaking essential logistic functions. Every company individually groping for the limit on how far they can push it over and over again. Does this lead anywhere? How long until, I dunno, trucking breaks down completely because they run out of warm bodies to stick in the cabs?
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Aug 30, 2019 08:26
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I'd say its already broken down. Customer experince is tanking, but it doesn't cut into the bottom line so they do it. Its so weird too, there's no coordination, if marketing is wayching hours or a meeting is comming then overtime gets agressivly cut. Then the store is understaffed, nothing gets done and the next week starts out a mess, requiring more overtime! It will get worse though, squeezing labor costs has been the thing for decades now. We got this high performance work environment now, which is basically do more with less people, and if you can't its on you. I think its because they finally had to start raising wages, so they're cutting labor hours to keep labor costs the same as before. I honestly am starting to think their plan is to push fewer and fewer workers till they automate more or the foot traffic in stores dies because its all online ordering in the next decade.
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Aug 30, 2019 09:57
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I work in the medical laboratory field nowadays, and we had a company-wide production dept. zoom meeting (online w/ webcams). In it, one of the execs happily proclaimed that we are now 95% staffed, hooray! One of the people from another state asked "Where did you get that number from, is this just management's opinion, or...?" All of the employees tried not to laugh. All of the managers where like WHO IS THIS GUY WHO SAID THAT. Because we are chronically understaffed by design, the budgeted 200 or so bodies across three states currently sits at 190 or so positions filled. Realistically, 250 would be ideal, with personnel cross-trained and nobody on call for emergencies anymore, but there's no way in gently caress they'd ever allocate that much money to labor. Meanwhile literal millions roll in from our efforts. It's the same everywhere.
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Aug 30, 2019 11:35
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Liquid Communism posted:Stop championing a race to the bottom. Moving from getting paid $60 an hour to $40 an hour is not a race to the bottom. The latter is still an extremely livable wage - its moving from the 97th income percentile to the the 90th income percentile in the US for someone in their late 20s, like the person being quoted. When pharmacies are paying pharmacists such high wages the costs are passed onto people who can afford them even less: the working class, retired, or unemployed people who need prescription drugs. The solution is not "ensure every college graduate gets paid over $100k per year in their 20s so they can pay off their massive debt", because the money from that for the most part doesn't come from corporations profits - it comes from the pockets of working class people who are nowhere near the 97th, or 90th, or even 50th, income percentile. In more reasonable countries students can study pharmacy without getting into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. They can then be paid a wage closer to the median income and not struggle financially, and the poorer parts of the population can then pay less for their drugs. The massive over-payment of medical professionals is a big factor in the US healthcare system being so expensive and awful for poor people. Blut fucked around with this message at 12:10 on Aug 30, 2019 |
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Aug 30, 2019 12:08
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The problem is you’re advocating for corporations rather than the worker and if you’re doing that you done hosed up. Jeff Bezos could find universal healthcare himself but instead of advocating him pay the loving bill you think workers are being overpaid for being in their 20s.
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Aug 30, 2019 12:30
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Another way to put it is that the difference between $60 and $40 per hour doesn't end up as savings for the customer, but just extra profit for the company since customers were already paying when labor was $60.
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Aug 30, 2019 12:56
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Invalid Validation posted:The problem is you’re advocating for corporations rather than the worker and if you’re doing that you done hosed up. Jeff Bezos could find universal healthcare himself but instead of advocating him pay the loving bill you think workers are being overpaid for being in their 20s. Dameius posted:Another way to put it is that the difference between $60 and $40 per hour doesn't end up as savings for the customer, but just extra profit for the company since customers were already paying when labor was $60. No, I'm advocating for the poor and working class instead of the overpaid white collar professional. If pharmacists insist on getting paid $125k a year then its not the pharmacy owner whos going to pay the extra salary costs out of their own profit, its the customers who have to pay higher drug prices to cover it. Most of the rest of the developed world pays its medical professionals significantly less, because they're not a) burdened with hundreds of thousands of dollars in college debt and b) not under the expectation that earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per year is what they're due. And as a result, massive savings are made in their medical systems. Which benefit poor people, who then pay less for their drugs and healthcare. Defending the income level of someone in the 97th income percentile is pretty much the definition of "if you’re doing that you done hosed up".
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Aug 30, 2019 13:20
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Really a big problem is that often there isn't any competition. Sometimes Walmart is the only game in town that matters as far as buying almost anything goes. Granted another snag is that the internet is eating brick and mortar's lunch like crazy. I guarantee that part of it is the places seeing the writing on the wall and just trying to squeeze all the profit they can out before the entire thing sinks. Even so the treatment that retail employees have been getting is utterly demoralizing; they're often being put under a microscope and made to increase  THE NUMBERS at all costs. Meanwhile the company is demanding better numbers every quarter forever even if the numbers end up being literally impossible.One of the reasons that it confuses me is that Sam Walton himself even said that the way you treat your employees is the way they'll treat your customers. Nobody likes Walmart at this point but they've just gotten so gargantuan it isn't really all that possible to meaningfully compete with them. Like was said customer service has completely gone down the tubes. When it becomes clear the company doesn't give a single poo poo about you then you quit giving a single poo poo about the customer. If there was any meaningful competition to Walmart the company would have burned to the ground by now. Same goes for Amazon, really; nobody likes all the news coming out about how terrible Amazon is but...well where the gently caress else are you going to go?
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Aug 30, 2019 13:23
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Really a big problem is that often there isn't any competition. Sometimes Walmart is the only game in town that matters as far as buying almost anything goes. Granted another snag is that the internet is eating brick and mortar's lunch like crazy. I guarantee that part of it is the places seeing the writing on the wall and just trying to squeeze all the profit they can out before the entire thing sinks. Even so the treatment that retail employees have been getting is utterly demoralizing; they're often being put under a microscope and made to increase walton was an anti union prick as well
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Aug 30, 2019 13:28
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Blut posted:No, I'm advocating for the poor and working class instead of the overpaid white collar professional. attacking workers wages as getting paid "too much" in relation to cost inputs in the healthcare industry like shareholder profit and drug cost is extremely galaxy brained Blut posted:Defending the income level of someone in the 97th income percentile is pretty much the definition of "if you’re doing that you done hosed up". yeah no, sorry do medical professionals get paid too much? maybe. are medical professional wages the reason why healthcare costs are so high? think about that for a bit
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Aug 30, 2019 13:46
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Blut posted:No, I'm advocating for the poor and working class instead of the overpaid white collar professional. If pharmacists insist on getting paid $125k a year then its not the pharmacy owner whos going to pay the extra salary costs out of their own profit, its the customers who have to pay higher drug prices to cover it. I get your position, but I don't think you've thought through the situation. Capitol is not going to convert a $20/h windfall from squeezing labor into savings for their customer base. They are going to convert that windfall into extra profit. By not advocating for all labor, you enrich capital and just create more members of the bottom half of the labor pool. I'm not saying you need to go do direct protest action to save the money of high income labor, especially when there is still so much to do for the bottom half of the labor pool. But it is a net negative whenever capital successfully puts the squeeze on any segment of labor. Also, like others have said, the labor cost of pharmacists is not the primary or even driving factor in the costs of consumer prices for that field, and if you think that they are, then you need to do a lot more reading on the subject.
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Aug 30, 2019 14:11
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Blut posted:Going from $60 an hour ($2400+ a week, $125k a year) to $40 an hour ($1600+ a week, $83k a year) as someone in their mid/late 20s is not a reasonable life complaint. The problem there is not low wages, they're both comparatively extremely high. The problem is the $200k of college debt. Did you have a fishing accident or is that a trickle-down economics baited hook in your cheek?
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Aug 30, 2019 14:47
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Work it from the top then when you fix it there you can start asking if middle class white collar jobs are being paid too much. The super rich are the problem, not the working rich.
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Aug 30, 2019 14:57
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When making posts like that your annual income should be a footnote at the beginning.
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Aug 30, 2019 15:02
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Blut posted:No, I'm advocating for the poor and working class instead of the overpaid white collar professional. If pharmacists insist on getting paid $125k a year then its not the pharmacy owner whos going to pay the extra salary costs out of their own profit, its the customers who have to pay higher drug prices to cover it. gently caress this. At least the 20 year old is going to spend that $125k instead of hoarding it like a loving dragon.
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Aug 30, 2019 15:09
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