Disconnect. . .

. . . and self-destruct one bullet at a time.
CP: Did you ever get the feeling that retail pharmacy is killing itself? I know, silly question.
CP's Partner: That's all we ever talk about. The devolution of pharmacy. What brought about this somber thought today?
CP: The disconnect.
CPP: Which one?
CP: The largest national chains.
CPP: What about them?
CP: They have a horribly negative image nationally. They are constantly in the news for all the wrong reasons, resulting in bad publicity, which affects all of their operations.
CPP: Yeah. And?
CP: Patients have no choice but to do business with them and instead of entering into the patient-pharmacist relationship with open arms and open minds, they are predisposed to animosity based on the national news.
CPP: What made you have this revelation?
CP: Patient surveys, conference calls, and constant nagging from corporate that "the guest comes first".
CPP: Sounds like the motto at a brothel.
CP: We've made the same allusion multiple times; how not too dissimilar are our approaches to business. Anyway, think about it. A retail profession with an awful track record in the national news wants its stores to be held to a higher standard. In stores, they have satisfactions surveys and hold the stores accountable for "customer complaints".
CPP: If your business has a negative image around the whole world, and your corporate office is doing nothing to repair it, improve it, or even deny it, you're asking how can the stores be held to a higher standard?
CP: Precisely. If I get a complaint for something out of my control, or even directly attributable to the corporate overlords, I am the one who gets in trouble, not the business. Maybe if you cleaned up your image and stopped pissing off the pharmacy patients, the pharmacy patients would have a better impression of us. Maybe if you acted as if you cared about us by, I don't know, giving us more help, patients wouldn't be so pissed off about their wait times. When I coach, one of my philosophies is "I will never yell at you for not doing something I didn't teach you how to do". It should be the same in the business world: "We won't hold against you something you couldn't do because we didn't provide you the tools to succeed".
CPP: Profound.
CP: Unfortunately, pharmacists have become all too successful at working with what we have in spite of our circumstances because we work with our brains and it's difficult to take those away.
CPP: That's probably next.
CP: And there will probably be a metric and a complaint that I didn't think fast enough. Seriously though, why do companies expect their staff and stores to change the company image when the company is constantly tarnishing it publicly?
CPP: Maybe we should set up our own website to accurately measure patient satisfaction. We could have one result for the company and one for the store staff.
CP: Question Number 1: Do you like your pharmacy?
       Question Number 2: Did you die?
CPP: If not, continue with the survey.