A Few of My Pills, Lots More Elsewhere
I’ve been going to the pharmacy for as long as I can remember. As a little kid in Findlay, Ohio, I still remember the pharmacy was The Medicine Shoppe and my parents joked with the pharmacist asking which of his kids we were putting through college by now.
I could probably take you to the pharmacy even though we moved before I started driving.
I remember there was a motion-detector in the corner by the door and I’d try to move around slowly while Mom paid to see if I could get from one side of the store to the other without tripping the light on it.
I remember my pharmacist at our local Publix after we moved here knew me by name. His name was Bruce and he called me “Mr. Petersen” when I was only 17 or 18.
Our Publix pharmacy next to our apartments when we got married had a quick-learning and personable college-age girl with cute glasses frames (that was her nickname between Beautiful and me, “glasses frames girl”) who never needed to ask my name. She saw me walk to the general area of the pharmacy and would pull anything that was mine that was ready. She even started to recognize Beautiful if she was the one doing the picking up for me.
This all changed when we bought our house and can’t seem to get perfect service anywhere, but we are giving one of the Publix pharmacies another shot now that they fired their pharmacy manager about a year ago. One girl recognizes me, but still confirms my name and address. We’ll get her trained, too.
CFers always train their pharmacies and pharmacists. We probably visit a pharmacy every week – sometimes 4 times per week, plus deliveries from mail-order specialty pharmacies. a couple of times per month. It’s a lot of Rx co-pays and a lot of “hey, you should recognize me by now.”
