You Have The Money

As business persons, we are always taught the easiest expenses to control are payroll.
What's the first thing new managers always cut when they take over a store/district/region/company?
Payroll.
But what if your business is growing?
What if you ask more of your team than they care capable of doing?
What then?
Keep cutting hours.
Why? Because you never learned how to manage other sectors of your business and you only learned that payroll is the easiest to cut. At some point, all of your employees will be gone and you'll be left wondering who is going to do the work.
But I digress. Here is my point for the day.

CVS and Walgreens each operate approximately 10,000 pharmacies.
They are typically the lowest on the industry customer satisfaction surveys.
Their wait times are horrible.
Their phone wait times are reprehensible.
They keep cutting hours and asking their staff to do more.
The average preschooler could figure out how to fix this.

Here's my thinking:
IF each of these above-mentioned chains hired ONE technician, for 40 hours per week, for EACH of their stores, at a cost of $500-$600/week ($12.50-$15.00/hr) for 52 weeks per year, guess how much it would cost the companies?
ONE Full-Time Tech per store would cost the company $260 TO $300 MILION per year.
Holy shit! That's a lot of money.
(Now we all know that the benefits paid to these employees will double that number, right? I'm getting there.)

Wait. What's that?

CVS had a revenue of >$97 BILLION in 2017 (including specialty)?
Walgreens had a revenue > $64 BILLION in 2017?
So you're trying to tell me that, for a fraction of those revenues, (~1%) they could reinvest in actual help, shorten their wait times, improve their customer service, fill more prescriptions (and correctly), administer more shots, and allow their pharmacists to do more pharmacist tasks?
Are they really terrible at budgeting?
Are they selfish and want the money for their bonuses?

Seriously. Think about those numbers. Just reinvesting <2% of their revenue could pay for 2 FT techs at EVERY store in the company. What would the return on the investment be?
(1% of $64B = $640M)
How about they hire ONE FT Tech and give the others raises?

When we are already stretched thin and errors are the worst thing that could happen, what does it say about a company that doesn't want to invest a simple 1% of its revenues in you?
In your health?
In your sanity?
In your wellbeing?
In its OWN health and wellbeing?

As people have asked me, and I have asked myself, why, during the busiest time of the year (first of the month, first of the year, insurance changes, the dead of pharmacy winter), are they cutting hours?