You're right that salaries are indexed to the new hire rate. This is because pharmacists are scarce as it is, and the conversion to all-PharmD degrees has stretched the resources of many colleges, so that they are admitting fewer students yearly. So for the next few years there will be even fewer new grads, while the avg. number of prescriptions per person is rising, and the number of new drugs increases by >50/year. So new grads are basically driving the compensation of the entire profession. At some point this will stop, and the pay scale will normalize to some extent.
Things are worse in retail than in hospital. Most retail chains pay ALL their pharmacists roughly the same wage. In hospitals, there is more of a graded scale, which generally differs by about $15/hr between the highest and lowest paid staff pharmacists. But the bottom line is, pharmacy is one of those professions where the compensation has an upper limit. If you want more money, you can go into management.
I haven't seen much resentment, except in retail. And honestly, there's not much difference in skill or knowledge between a pharmacist with a year of retail experience, and one with 20 years experience. If anything, most new grads are MORE knowledgeable than the veterans. It's a little different in hospitals, where the learning curve is a bit steeper.
