Sure. Fine. Whatever.

The real problem is not that employees don’t care. The problem isn’t that customers are too demanding. It isn’t whether or not workers get along with each other or any of that. The problem is that companies have no idea what they’re doing.

I personally work as a pharmacy technician in a chain store. I have been working there for a few years now and let me tell you, it’s not easy. Now I know the first thing that some of you will jump to is that this must be written by a millennial and that I need to grow up. The first assumption is definitely true, the second one, I would also absolutely agree with. However, that does not change the fact that like so many other businesses, we are simply not given enough workers to complete the tasks presented to us.

As I stated, I do work in a pharmacy. I know that most stores, companies, restaurants, etc. run into these issues, but the best way that I can explain is through what I know.

Let me start out here by explaining how things work in a pharmacy. You have four main areas: front counter, drive thru (some places this does not apply), counting, and processing (where the prescriptions are typed).

When a prescription is dropped off, the person that takes it is usually the person at processing. They scan the paper and then have to type out the prescribing doctor, the date it was written, etc. Normally it does not take too long to type, but there are circumstances where we have to create new profiles for customers and sometimes there’s problems with insurance. After we type it, the pharmacist has to check our work. Once they decide that it’s been done correctly, it goes into a queue for the person who is counting. That person will print out a label and retrieve the drug and count it out and then hand it to the pharmacist to check. Only once the pharmacist has checked it can it then be handed over to a patient. Now a few minutes later it will go into a queue to be checked again and anyone this time can check it, we just compare what the doctor wrote to what was typed. It’s a triple check to ensure that the wrong thing wasn’t dispensed.

It seems simple enough, but the fact of the matter is that there never is only one prescription to type, there is always more than one to count and to check. People have to answer phones and put the order away. Some people have to leave to go show customers where certain products are.

Let’s say you have one person at each area. That seems fine, right? Each person does their job and everything gets done. Wrong.

If there is a long line up front, someone has to leave their area to go help clear the line out, this means that there’s either prescriptions that are not getting typed or orders that are not getting counted. So if the person who is counting leaves to go help for ten minutes, their queue is going to fill up while they’re gone and it will be hard to catch back up. All the sudden there’s people in line asking for things that are not finished yet. If there were one or two extra people there, this would not be a problem. I personally have had nights where I would help at drive thru, be typing prescriptions on another screen while helping the customer and then running off and counting something in between people.

When this is happening there are things that are simply not getting done. This means that someone has to go to the customer and tell them for the third time that their prescription is not done yet because no one has gotten the chance to get to it yet. You’re just getting to the people that were there an hour before her.

It’s these types of things that cause customers to leave. I don’t blame them, I would get upset too if I had to wait two hours for an antibiotic. I would get upset too if I were sick and just wanting to get my stuff and go home. And at that point there is less money coming so the company cannot spend as much money on us. I understand how that works. The problem though is that taking money and hours away from us is the very thing making the problem worse. If at the very beginning they would make sure to give us enough hours to schedule the people we needed, then maybe this all could have been avoided.

Now we’re losing customers and workers. No one wants to get paid just a little over minimum wage to try and work multiple positions only to get yelled at and coughed on and sneezed on and cussed out. If we were getting paid more, like maybe fifteen dollars an hour at least, but that’s not the case. A lot of places are not making it worth it to stick around through the rough patches and the companies that do make it worthwhile are the ones stealing workers and growing.

…and I be like…