Pharmacy is open 14 hours a day on weekdays (except 24 hour stores) so pharmacist may have to work a 14 hours shift unless they and their partner decide to split the days. Very understaffed sometimes there is no technician to cover a shift so the pharmacist is all alone. Pay is low for technicians hence its hard to hire people and there is a limit to the number of technician hours you are allotted for the week. As a 5th year pharmacy intern I was making $13.50 an hour though I had been working there since high school (at that time my pay was $6.75) whereas a college sophomore with no experience was receiving $13 an hour right from the start at Target, which has a significantly less workload than chain pharmacies like CVS. Also, when I first finished my technician training (not national certification but CVS training) my salary was increased to $8 which was the same amount an acquittance was receiving at a mail order pharmacy for just sticking labels on the bottles! In addition to dispensing duties, there are other responsibilities including calling customers before their refill is due to ask if they would like you to refill it for them when the time comes. Hence with all these responsibilities and only a few employers per shift, employees get stressed and customers do not get proper attention. If one customer has a problem that needs to be resolved, every other customer gets held up if there is not enough staff. The biggest issue is the "store score." Store scores depend on customer service, completing of duties within specified time, training status of techs, etc. Store score is important because your pharmacy supervisor's bonus depends on all his assigned stores having a good score so you can imagine the pressure on the employees to maintain the store score. Sometime new pharmacists start working without being properly trained/ready and it really affects customer service and adds to the stress on the rest of the staff. There's a lack of a proper break though a few years ago they started mandating that all techs who work an 8 hour shift or longer must punch out for 1/2 hour for an unpaid break so if you want a full 8 hour shift pay, you would have to stay an extra 1/2 hour. And when its really busy, if you're a really dedicated employee you are not going to be eating during that break, you're gonna continue working even if you're not getting paid and if you don't work then that just means more work piled up for you when you return. Pharmacist must always be available to help customers even if on break but that's actually a state law. Lack of loyalty to employees especially now that there are so many people looking for employment but not enough jobs. I have seen people from competitor companies get hired as Pharmacist-in-charge rather than promoting current employees. Also, I've seen new graduates who did not work for the company previously get offered staff positions immediately while those worked for the company for years as techs and interns and underwent training have to start off as floaters, move to another state, or just not get offered a position at all.
