I came in before open, set my coffee on the counter, and pulled up a stool right as the regional executives walked in.
The district manager was mid-pitch about his consolidation plan when one of the executives asked him a simple question: who was the pharmacist-in-charge on this store’s license?
It was me. It had been me for thirty years. My name and my license were what let that pharmacy legally open its doors every single morning. His “technician demotion” would have left the store with no pharmacist-in-charge at all — something he had never thought to check, because to him the license was a line on a chart, not a person.
Then it got worse for him. During the review they pulled the store’s incident log. The week he began sidelining me to “streamline,” a blood thinner had gone out at ten times the prescribed dose — exactly the kind of mix-up I had caught a hundred times over thirty years. A technician following an app had waved it through. An elderly customer only caught it because she asked to speak to “the pharmacist she always talks to,” and I walked over on my way out the door and stopped it at the counter.
He called me a bottleneck. A bottleneck is also the thing that keeps everything from spilling out at once.
The executives had flown in to decide which stores to keep. They kept this one — and they kept me, as pharmacist-in-charge, with the district manager’s “streamlining” authority quietly pulled.
He was reassigned within the month.
I still stand behind that counter. I still know every patient’s meds by heart. And when someone new asks why the wait is thirty seconds longer here than at the app, I tell them the truth: because somebody is actually looking.