Rite Aid

I don't work for this company. But I currently finished doing an IPPE here about 2 hours ago. For such a well known name in chain pharmacy, I'd have to say the experience was eye-opening. So, I work for Walgreens as an intern. Everybody there complains about Walgreens. I interned with Target. Everybody there complains about Target. Rite Aid people complain too. However, they have a signicantly less sophisticated computer system and their counseling point stickies are among the most aggravating labels I've ever worked with.

My preceptor, a barbie, soft-spoken, under-intellectual woman of 35 years, on three seperate occasions, has attempted to teach me how to properly apply these counseling point labels to no success. Just so you know, the main label and counseling point labels all print out on the same sticky. The stickies are 5 different colored perforations with different counseling points for each color.

Around halfway through my internship, my preceptor switched my role from that of a thinking practitioner-in-the-making to that of a lick-and-stick subway sandwich artist. She obsessed and supervised my use of scotch tape to press down on the labels, pull them off the sticky backbone, fold them in half and still stick them onto the vial perfectly symmetrical. She admonished me for not being "pharmaceutically elegant" enough, and her economy of me as a robot intern filler dropped to about an eighth of original productivity from before just because of how tricky this was for me. For example, I'd pull the labels off of the backbone and suddenly the tape would stick to the sig label or to another part of the tape and just cause chaos; sometimes the paint from the colored parts of the sig label would bleed off onto the tape and 9n98ybg98d7ufng98d7fng987n9sd8fg7uns...it'd just be a mess. I'd have to reprint labels, take more mild verbal abuse for being too much of an idiot to do this as adeptly as her and so on. So, to avoid getting yelled at as often, I'd put only one or two of the counseling points (leaving off inane points like "Call your doctor if your symptoms don't improve") in hopes that she'd like "pharmaceutical elegance" as it pertains to counseling points that are actually useful to the patient. But unfortunately her staff pharmacist, who is 4 years younger than me, started bitching about "picking and choosing how to consult", wasting even more precious time that could have been used to fill their prescriptions uncompensated. So, today, I kind of perfected my skill by first prying off the labels by hand, THEN adding the tape on top, folding and THEN attaching the labels as straightly as possible on the side of the vial. In other words, I added the tape to the labels after they were detached and not before. The princess micromanager that she is, my preceptor noticed this and got ticked off. HAHAHA. The same outcome was achieved but she didn't like my means.

So does this label fable shed light on the types of pharmacists Rite Aid hires, or on the company as a whole? Was it a personal thing she had with me, such as a power trip? I do not know. I factored what fraction of my tuition, credit-hours wise, does to my IPPE. Basically, I paid $2,278 to be harassed by Barbie regarding how to apply a horribly designed set of counseling labels. I also learned that ALL retail pharmacists, doesn't matter what you work, work to avoid: their practice isn't guided by common sense or their particular circumstances, but by doing exactly how they were told from middle management to do things...I shall dubb it Conflict Aversion Pharmacy Practice. All in the name of avoiding reprimanding, correction and general visits from upper management.

Ugh. If just I had a word that started with R between "Conflict" and "Aversion", this acronym could be a self description. Am I destined to become this kind of pharmacist?