Does anyone else think that...

[b*rizzle]

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...the gift card is a bastardization of retail pharmacy? Something that happened at work yesterday absolutely disgusted me.

Discuss.

 

[All4MyDaughter]

What happened?

 

[OSURxgirl]

If you are talking about chains giving patients free store gift cards in exchange for bringing in their new or transferred prescription to your pharmacy to be filled, I couldn't agree more. We have some people who transfer so much they honestly do not know where their prescriptions are anymore.

I work at a pharmacy that does this, and I hate it. All these other patient safety measures and technology have been introduced into this pharmacy, but the company is undermining it by publishing "free gift card" coupons in its publication that encourage polypharmacy....aarrgh.
Plus when we run these coupons we have people filling prescriptions from months ago that they don't even need just because their copay is 5 bucks and the free gift card is 10 bucks. Do the math. Sigh.

 

[b*rizzle]

What happened?

A lady came in two weeks ago, on a Tuesday. She had a new Rx, but said she didn't have her coupon for her $25 gift card on her. She swore up and down that she had one, so like the good tech that I am, I told her to keep her copy of the receipt and to just bring it (and the coupon) back when she found it. I left a note detailing the situation in a basket, along with a copy of her receipt, so that if she came back when I wasn't there, the situation could be remedied expeditiously.

I came back to work from vacation yesterday, only to find that she had come in the Thursday after she brought in her Rx, and the RPh told her what my note said. She then claimed that I had taken her gift card coupon and held on to it because gift cards weren't processing. (The part about cards not processing is true, but we were still able to issue them). The RPh told the lady that there was no reason for me to take her coupon under the circumstances, and that I'm an honest and reliable person, and would not cheat her out of a gift card coupon if she deserved one.

A tech told me that she called that Wednesday to 1) verify who worked Tuesday night and 2) if the gift card machines were working.

Well this lady called the DM and complained -- multiple times, apparently. He emailed our pharmacy manager, telling her to "deal with the technician's attitude problem" and "issue a gift card ASAP." Both RPhs stood up for me to the DM. His response was that he "didn't care what the tech had to say" and that "the customer needs to be given a gift card, regardless of the circumstances."

In the end, what upset me the most was not that a customer was dishonest and was rewarded for it, but that the corporate mentality is that it's better to keep a few dishonest customers (who will probably "card hop" anyway) than to stand up for the integrity of its employees. It doesn't seem to do much for their public image, either. They make it seem like they employ a bunch of greedy a-holes that are just out to cheat the customer.

Years of retail experience in other industries has taught me that this is how most situations of this nature are handled, but I work hard and I'm friendly, and I'll go the extra mile for our customers because I love what I do and I plan to make this my livelihood. I like people to enjoy some aspect of their trip to the pharmacy.

But this hurt...the value of my word was degraded for a silly gift card.

 

[b*rizzle]

If you are talking about chains giving patients free store gift cards in exchange for bringing in their new or transferred prescription to your pharmacy to be filled, I couldn't agree more. We have some people who transfer so much they honestly do not know where their prescriptions are anymore.

I work at a pharmacy that does this, and I hate it. All these other patient safety measures and technology have been introduced into this pharmacy, but the company is undermining it by publishing "free gift card" coupons in its publication that encourage polypharmacy....aarrgh.
Plus when we run these coupons we have people filling prescriptions from months ago that they don't even need just because their copay is 5 bucks and the free gift card is 10 bucks. Do the math. Sigh.

Yeah, we get customers that openly brag about how they manage to get gift cards from all of the major chains; one lady even told me that she went to the doc solely to get a few Rxs with lower copays (like naproxen, Flonase, BC pills, and Retin A) and just keeps moving them around for no reason other than to rack up gift cards. She says what she does is raise a stink about some aspect of the service and because managers don't want to lose customers, they issue the gift cards even though she's already gotten a few.

I was taken aback by her dishonesty. I've heard of cheating the system but that seemed a bit extreme to me.

 

[crossjb]

b*rizzle, that's horrible but don't take it personally.

We live in a litigious society where appeasing customers -- honest or not -- is priority #1.

 

[b*rizzle]

b*rizzle, that's horrible but don't take it personally.

We live in a litigious society where appeasing customers -- honest or not -- is priority #1.

I understand that...believe me, I've largely moved on.

My point is that it doesn't say much about business ethics.

 

[DHG]

In the end, what upset me the most was not that a customer was dishonest and was rewarded for it, but that the corporate mentality is that it's better to keep a few dishonest customers (who will probably "card hop" anyway) than to stand up for the integrity of its employees. It doesn't seem to do much for their public image, either. They make it seem like they employ a bunch of greedy a-holes that are just out to cheat the customer.

Ohh. 😡
I feel your pain. I was a retail sales manager (NOT in Pharmacy, at a national chain home furnishings store) and we had a few "regulars" like this... Time after time, Corporate would override our judgement in the store. From our point of view, we didn't want that customer at our store... one in particular ended up costing us a lot of money, over and over, because of her dishonesty. But the powers that were didn't see it that way. It pissed me off because they automatically valued the word of someone who I knew to be dishonest over that of their employees.

The customer is only always right within limits. The line has to be drawn in extraordinary circumstances, if it becomes an ongoing problem, but Corporate never sees it that way. Because they are a bunch of Bozo-pencil-pushers (Power-point-pushers?) that couldn't find their asses with both hands --- unless they had a 300 page manual detailing all the wonderful ways that company X can help motivate said hands to find said asses, preferably filled with glossy color photos of happy, multicultural Company X employees wearing spiffy Company X uniforms (freshly starched and pressed), assisting equally happy and eternally greatful customers. When the real world happens to look different, they don't have a clue.

 

[bananaface]

Your pharmacist/manager should have backed you up if you said you didn't take the coupon. If they won't do this, you are working in the wrong place.

 

[kkelloww]

I would like to provide input from the other side. I was a District Manager in fast food for 15+ years. I had many instances of a valued employee saying one thing and a customer saying another. I always sided with the customer. Period.

Understand that this is not a situation of right or wrong. I always believed my employees were telling the truth, but this is business and the customers write our checks. Give the dishonest customer the $25. That money is irrelevant to a billion dollar corporation and there is the possibility in the future that the customer might actually buy something.

Besides, if I didn't take care of the customer my boss would or his boss would, etc. Sooner or later somebody would give them the gift card. IMO, the tech should have done it.

 

[b*rizzle]

Your pharmacist/manager should have backed you up if you said you didn't take the coupon. If they won't do this, you are working in the wrong place.

She did. In fact, both of the pharmacists backed me up.

 

[b*rizzle]

I would like to provide input from the other side. I was a District Manager in fast food for 15+ years. I had many instances of a valued employee saying one thing and a customer saying another. I always sided with the customer. Period.

Understand that this is not a situation of right or wrong. I always believed my employees were telling the truth, but this is business and the customers write our checks. Give the dishonest customer the $25. That money is irrelevant to a billion dollar corporation and there is the possibility in the future that the customer might actually buy something.

Besides, if I didn't take care of the customer my boss would or his boss would, etc. Sooner or later somebody would give them the gift card. IMO, the tech should have done it.

For the record, I was the one who called the customer and told her that we had a gift card waiting for her. And no one told or asked me to do it.

I understand and respect your perspective, but as a district manager, you would not continue to insist to the employee (or the employee's manager) that the employee was in the wrong, whether or not you think it is a matter of right or wrong to begin with. It's a matter of morale. Good help is hard to come by. What would you accomplish by sending a trained technician out the door? I'm not perfect but I think I do a damned good job, and I happen to know that it takes a lot of time and effort to train a technician well.

Customers at our pharmacy always tell us how friendly we are compared to other stores. They are always appreciative when their Rxs are done in less than 15 minutes, and they're done correctly. Now, in part for this reason, the RPhs were also disgusted with the way this was handled. So there you see that it's more than just a disgruntled technician. In an area where there's already a shortage of retail pharmacists, I would think that as the DM, I would have to be a little more careful in how I handled the situation. You can't always make everyone happy, but certainly there were more tactful ways to handle the situation.

 

[OoKellyoO]

I think you handled the situation very well.
Here is my story: I used to work in the hospital and I trained this lady and she left work 3 hours before the end of the shift and then called HR to complain. It was a night shift. At the place where I used to work, it was always busy. We, including pharmacists never had breaks, but it was a Christmas-New Year week and all the patients were discharged and it was very slow and I mentioned that many times throughout the night to her. We didn't have much to do and I told her that the manager will come in to check on her and try to look busy. She called HR telling them that we're lazy and she was hired to do work, not to stand around. She twisted my words around. She didn't just tell on me, she talked trash about everyone in the pharmacy. I was just trying to be friendly.

She made me look bad. We're always running behind because we're always understaff and she made it sound like we're lazy. I was one of the best damned part time tech.

The manager was furious before hearing our sides of the story. I wasn't working the night after that, but everybody backed me up including the pharmacists. One of the pharmacists even said that the managers don't know how to defend their employees, but just pointing fingers. I wrote her an email asking her why she had to act that way, but she never wrote back. I chose my words very well when I wrote that email because I was afraid that she would forward the email to HR saying that I harrass her. I then wrote a very long email to my manager knowing that he would send it to HR, but little did I know he sent it to almost everyone in the pharmacy department. After that email, I think he started to show me some respect. He called me at home saying that it's life and sometimes we have to work with crazy people and blah blah. His tone was different. We have to stand up for ourselves or else people just step all over us.

 

[WVUPharm2007]

I hate it whenever the 60 or so people on medicaid don't read the fine print and think they deserve the $20 gift card for bringing in a script for Colace 100mg they don't pay anything for.

 

[museabuse]

giftcards

They don't get you customers. THey get you one script that you have to then transfer back to original pharmacy the next month or a different pharmacy for another $25.

 

[meg]

Heh. When I worked at Red Robin and we had a dishonest customer making a scene our manager would tell them not to come back... ever.

Man I liked that place.

 

[b*rizzle]

Heh. When I worked at Red Robin and we had a dishonest customer making a scene our manager would tell them not to come back... ever.

Man I liked that place.

I wish I worked at a place like that. Like museabuse said, pandering to the dishonest customer doesn't earn you a new customer. They just go on and pull the same stunt everywhere else. So turning them away means that they will just go and find another sucker.

So who are you really doing a favor?

And besides, if it was EVERYONE's corporate policy (and ONLY in cases where the customer's dishonesty was well documented) to not pander, you wouldn't have to worry about losing customers to other companies, because no one would cater to the jack@$$.

EDIT: I'm really sick of the idea that the customer is always right. Managers always say that they're not when they become abusive, but this is exactly when we cave and just give them what they're after, because a) such a small amount of money is trivial to a multi-million dollar corporation and b) because it's better to just give them what they want and get them out of the store.

 

[bananaface]

I would like to provide input from the other side. I was a District Manager in fast food for 15+ years. I had many instances of a valued employee saying one thing and a customer saying another. I always sided with the customer. Period.

Understand that this is not a situation of right or wrong. I always believed my employees were telling the truth, but this is business and the customers write our checks. Give the dishonest customer the $25. That money is irrelevant to a billion dollar corporation and there is the possibility in the future that the customer might actually buy something.

Besides, if I didn't take care of the customer my boss would or his boss would, etc. Sooner or later somebody would give them the gift card. IMO, the tech should have done it.

Letting the customer lie and benefit from that lie in this case sends the message that the technician is lying and therefore not trustworthy. If an employee cannot be trusted, they do not belong behind a pharmacy counter. Pharmacy is different than food service. In our profession it is important to maintain our professional integrity. In this case, siding with the customer would be unprofessional.

 

[b*rizzle]

Letting the customer lie and benefit from that lie in this case sends the message that the technician is lying and therefore not trustworthy. If an employee cannot be trusted, they do not belong behind a pharmacy counter. Pharmacy is different than food service. In our profession it is important to maintain our professional integrity. In this case, siding with the customer would be unprofessional.

*gives bananaface a standing ovation*

 

[nguyenkd]

these gift cards are ridiculous. especially people who transfer hctz or furosemide back and forth. we had one lady who racked up over $400 worth of coupons in 6 months. it's gotten to the point where the manager doesn't even care what the coupn states anymore (if the coupon says it has to be a transferred rx, we still give it to them even if it's a new rx, refill, whatever). cvs just released a $30 coupon. the funny thing... s we (wal-mart) see about 4 times as many coupons as the cvs down the street.

 

[luckyPharmD.stu]

...just when i thought becoming a pharmacist would be a rewarding career...i've actually heard many of these stories from other people; for some reason, the troublemaker is always a middle-aged lady, no offense to anyone.