Pros
The pay is competitive and the pension plan compares favourably to those available for pharmacists at other drug store chains. The employee store discount is also likely the best in the industry.
Cons
The working conditions and pressure are almost unbearable. Head office requires an extremely high number of "patient focused services" (aka PFS's) to be completed every day. These include meds checks and pharmacist opinions. At the same time, the labour metrics are the toughest I have seen in the industry. Dispensaries are staffed with minimal tech hours and pharmacist overlap is not available. In a 12 hour shift, a typical pharmacist may be expected to fill 200-300 prescriptions per day, complete a minimum of 12 meds checks and provide 15 flu shots while utilising very few tech hours and working without any pharmacist overlap. The Ontario ministry of health guidelines require a meds check to be a 20-30 minute consultation with a pharmacist. As it is not possible for a lone pharmacist to spend 20-30 minutes on each of 12+ meds checks per day while also checking 200-300 prescriptions, answering OTC questions and providing flu shots, meds checks are typically done very quickly (max. 5 minutes) over the counter when customers are picking up their medications. Head office calls all of the stores every three hours every day of the week (including stat holidays) to inquire as to how many meds checks have been performed. Management is very aggressive with cost cutting. Technician hours are constantly being reduced even if sales are improving, to the point that it becomes a patient safety issue. At the same time, financial targets are aggressive and difficult or impossible to achieve. It is also obvious that regional managers are under tremendous stress and pressure themselves. This trickles down to the store level and leads to tremendous pressure and stress being placed on the front line pharmacists. It also causes regional managers to be rude and condescending towards the technicians and pharmacists who are working in the stores, as they continuously seek to improve store performance without providing adequate resources to do so. In summary, this employer provides competitive total compensation. However, stingy dispensary labour metrics combined with difficult to reach targets, heavy workloads and a lack of empathy from regional managers make this a high pressure environment to work in which many pharmacists cannot tolerate for long.