I have worked for kroger for a long time and am not to impressed. The people from the office are completly oblivious as to what goes on in the pharmacy. They have no Idea how to handle problems and usually provide half baked solutions. This is going to get kinda long.
Cliff notes: The non pharmacy managers are all on a power trip, they have implement vague promotions that are not totally functional, and are on the verge of their dumbest idea yet
KEY RETAILING. They are not too great to work for, but I imagine they are not as bad as others. So basically you have to choose the lesser of the two evils.
Interaction with non pharmacy personel
I usually like to refer them to Nazi's. They pretty much look for ways to hassle you. If you shaved in the morning and have some stubble by the afternoon your are "talked" to many times throughout the day by insignificant "Front end managers" on a powertrip. If in a one month time span you clock in a minute late once, they have recorded it, print out a sheet, talk to you about the importance of arriving at work on time and have you sign the paper. The Store management think they are gods and dont waste an opportunity to try to display their "power".
BRILLIANT IDEAS OF THE PAST
The people in the pharmacy office are a joke. In an effort to be competitive they launch several promotions with out giving the pharmacy staff forewarning. For example they offer $20 coupons for every new or transferred RX, maxium of $60, that was put on their vip card. The catch is when the program first came out one person told us the patients could only get $20 per order even if they had transferred 3 rx's over. Someone else told us the patients could get all $60 in the same order. However, they had it set up where you could put one $20 coupon on per order. So if you had 3 new or transferred rx's, you had to ring the patient up three separate times. Big problem if your in a busy pharmacy. They have since set it up so that you can ring all three coupons in the same order.
KEY RETAILING
We can now move to Kroger incompetance of the future! A.K.A key retailing. Key retailing is a program kroger has come up with to compete with stores such as wags and walmart, and is basically just advocating good customer service. They are breaking this program up into different phases to ease it into practice. Another goal of this program is to make all the stores the same so everything is uniform where ever you go. The program will culminate with the introduction of the new computer system replacing pdx. Sounds great right???? No, not quite. Enter the first phase.
All the big wigs from kroger came to my store and informed us we were going to be a teaching store for all the other kroger stores in our area and we should feel honored. The basically picked us because we are a real slow store. They had all the pharmacy staff go to a meeting and emphasized the great wonders of workstations. Uh....too bad there is only one pharmacist and one tech working at any one given time. Thus their great workstation epiphany does not apply to us, and wasted my morning. None of this is too bad and could help busy stores. Except for the green sheets. Every time you get a refill request, new rx, transfer, ect you have to fill out a green sheet on the rx. It indicateds if the rx is new, expected pick up times, and problem indications (ins., no refills). This HAS to be filled out and kept with the rx up until the time the patient picks up the rx. It is meant to supplement the new computer system...however, there is no computer system yet. If the rx not ready when the patient comes back then you check a no box and put them in a basket to be collected at the end of the day and entered into the computer. If the rx is ready on time you THROW IT AWAY. What a complete waste of time. You go through all that effort to fill out this green piece of paper to throw it away at the end. We are informed this is going to cause us "Less work".
One day the big wigs came in and informed us that we did not have enough "No's" checked. WTF?!? we are a slow store who usually quotes wait times appropriatly enough to get the rx ready. We were informed if we tell the patient its going to take 20 minutes to fill the rx, they leave the drop off and immediatly go to the pick up station, we have to check "no" because it was not ready when the patient asked for the RX!
We were then informed that the "no" qualifications will eventally be less drastic over time. So basically they want to get a whole bunch of no's to begin with, phase them out to make it seem as if the key retailing is actually helping
thats all I can think of right now.
