40 to 50 years ago most pharmacies were independently owned and operated. Getting swallowed up by grocery stores is the worst thing to happen to pharmacy as a medical profession. It sucks for patients and it sucks for pharmacists. The pharmacists themselves are incredible resources. Nine times out of ten they are going to know much more about the drug you are picking up than your physician who prescribed it. Sometimes, the only real info your primary care doctor has on the drug they've prescribed to you was provided to them in PR pamphlets from a drug rep (along with free samples and other ethically questionable incentives). And generally they only know the broad strokes about which medications have potential to cross-interact or are likely to cause side effects that are medically relevant to a patient's health situation. Pharmacists have knowledge as well as professional tools (software) to help patients manage all of that.

But because they are part of grocery stores, and are basically a "loss leader" to get customers in the door, the pharmacists are being increasingly pressured (under threat of being fired) to abandon the principles of their profession -- one of the oldest professions in the world -- in order to increase the store's bottom line. It's kind of comparable to IT departments: they don't directly generate revenue (or rather, they lose more than they make) so any time a middle manager wants a bonus they try and think up new and creative ways to cut costs in the pharmacy department. And it keeps happening over and over, because profits must always go up, so pharmacy as a profession and pharmacists as medical professionals are just a hollow shell of what they once were and ought to be. Gone are the days where you could spend 15-20 minutes or more discussing your new medication regimen with your pharmacist, or asking about various symptoms you've been having since starting that new med, or have them tell you about the pros and cons of the 4 other medication options that your primary care doctor didn't even mention as they gave you a script and sent you on your way.

Add it to the list of things getting enshittified in the name of quarterly profits. There is real harm here, because navigating the healthcare system is incredibly difficult and is rife with sub-optimal outcomes simply because patients aren't even made aware of what options are available to them and what costs and risks/rewards are for each. Losing the ability to have serious one on one discussions with your pharmacist is one more resource that is slowly being taken off the table for reasons that only benefit a shockingly small percentage of the population.

From the article:

>Pharmacists have complained that this adds to their workload while they must fill the same volume of prescriptions with fewer people and work hours, according to posts on Facebook and independent message boards frequented by Walmart employees.

This is the exact same thing that was happening at a different national grocery chain that eventually forced my dad into retiring much earlier than he would have liked. He was facing a situation where he would have had to violate state laws regarding recordkeeping multiple times every day in order to keep up with the pace that store managers kept demanding. He said his colleagues who were younger just broke the law (and undermined patient safety to a small degree) by cutting corners. It was either that or start looking for a new profession, because the threat of being fired was constant. Since this situation has been playing out for the past decade, it's no surprise that there is a growing shortage of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians.