Okay, I feel like I just read a thread of hot garbage.
"Can I live on 120k"? You're goddamn right you can! Let's not forget teachers with families live on $40k.
Excuse me-- if you bought a Bugatti right out of school and had 9 kids, then you may have mild difficulty living better than most Americans on your pharmacist salary lol.
Yes, the job market is saturated, but it sounds like the people with major difficulty are in California or somewhere on the east coast.
What about everywhere else? What continually growing Phoenix? Colorado?
Also, everyone here whines about retail so damn much. Hey, here's $120,000 now deal with the occasional upset patient, give some vaccinations, and give candy to your techs. Yeah you have to meet metrics, but it seems like a relatively easy job compared to hospital.
Please someone tell me what I'm missing here.
You're missing the non-pecuniary benefits. I would trade my guaranteed $165k civil service desk job that pensions in four years for a guaranteed job at the Economist for $40k a year. You travel the world on the company's dime, write anonymous pieces when you feel like it, and end the job when you pick up that NYT wedding's spouse. It's better than having to read report after report about pharmacists and physicians who I can't do anything about because they can't be fired or even disciplined which the entire exercise is a meaningless waste of time (someone pressured me into spending a week taking this job as we are too far behind).
Teachers get:
1. Low education and low barriers to entry
2. A job that is NOT only union, but has specific legal protections against discipline
3. A schedule that allows for children and summers (and for year-round, still more time off than the average person)
4. Intellectually and emotionally rewarding if you want it to be
5. Can choose the circumstances of their work environment (pharmacists cannot besides the occupation, you don't control when scripts come in).
Pharmacists get:
1. Money...
I'm not saying that the market is efficient, but higher paying jobs, there's a reason for it even within a profession because you just can't get people to do productive work any other way. Teachers in the public city systems are paid usually between 1.5-4X private school teachers, but even with that, the results are still marginal. If money is what has to be offered to get the right person in the door, then usually everything else has been tried as money is the one tangible that a business really doesn't want to part with. It's not in an employer's interest to give you more money when they can get away with granting you perks.
And sometimes those perks mean something too. Yeah, I do complain about my pay in the civil service as it is lower than my peers, but I'm not accountable in the normal sense to anyone, I have a guaranteed job, and the work (besides these details) is pretty lighthearted and simple where I can spend most of my time reading at work which I would have done anyway. $120k, could be far more than what it's worth to some, but to others, no way no how if they have to put up with the stuff we do.
And yes, $120k (or $165k for that matter) wouldn't ever get me to work at where I interned at ever again. I'm way past the 3rd and Hell stage of my career.
As an aside, you should the browse anesthesiology forum for a comparison on how the other half lives. There are higher stakes for the type of work (piecework) that we do. I'm sorry, but if I were them, I'm not going to deal with 4-1 or 5-1 patient ratios as they're talking about to maintain salary parity with the past. I think 3-1 is kind of a bunch of work where it's not those easy times, but the few disasters that 3-1 makes life very, very difficult. They can keep their higher pay, although they "do" less than we do, what they are responsible for is a bigger problem, but when things go wrong...It's about choices and what is needed for the market to be considered productive that counts.
