Well, as far as I know, most pharmacies have 1 pharmacist on duty at a time. Since every (I think) state (federal?) law requires a pharmacy to have a pharmacist on duty, I don't see them even being able to fire pharmacists if they want to stay in business.
The reason pharmacies are becoming abundant is because they are so profitable, and this will only _increase_ the profitability of retail pharmacies. Pharmacies won't be closing down due to this.
The biggest threat I think are the mail-order pharmacies. However, the world is a place of instant gratification where we complain if we have to wait 5 minutes for our drive-through food. People would rather go to a retail outlet, especially for drugs which another person whose purpose is to save your life told you to take. General retail outlet sales are doing fine these days. The internet hasn't caused brick and mortar retailers to close up shop like everyone said in 1998.
Mail-Order and Automated Order-Filling isn't all its cracked up to be, at least these days in business-to-consumer market segments. Sure, in manufacturing automation has worked well, but people don't want to interact with a computer when they're paying you. It would be ridiculously trivial and cheap to put a touchscreen ordering system in every fast-food restaurant, but I've yet to see a single one. There are "Express" computerized lanes at the movie theatre (those money-sucking scum, I now just go to concerts for the same price) and the supermarket (those monopolizers!), but most people still prefer to see a warm-blooded it seems. ATMs seem to be doing okay, but for anything more complex than withdrawing money, most only trust a teller. I think I'm the only person that deposits cheques into ATMs. Anyone can guess what (especially old) people will trust their drugs to.
The only mail-order pharmacy use I think we('ll) see are by low-income and those with crappy insurance. Good insurance companies already/will advertise that they do _not_ require you to use their (mail-order) pharmacies.
Another potential threat would be governments allowing those with less credentials into the profession. For example, in the medical profession, Physician's Assistants. However, you can see that NO MD is losing their job, I think it was legitimately done for the purposes of preventing a dangerous shortage. On the plus side, if the profession takes a beating, we'd likely look pretty good to the PA adcoms 😉 .
Zpack: Could you possibly enlighten us as to what tasks hospital pharmacists have? (Hopefully more than just checking the technician's bottle-filling work!)
