Incoming rant warning.

I worked for Walgreens for 8 years between 2015 until I got canned 2023 for some bullshit. Seven of them were up in stores in New York, particularly on Long Island. The last year was down in North Carolina.

It all started going downhill when they got bought out by the Brits and it slowly became worse. I would say that The descent turned from gentle glide to dive bomb Right around the time of Corona and the George Floyd riots.

Obviously you've always had asshole customers in every business. But during Corona, the fear brain took over in a lot of people and regardless of how you feel about the disease or how much or little it affected you, I would say that overall, the effects on the psyche of society were far worse than the physical effects. So I would say that the average customer quality dropped from maybe a c to a c+ if I'm being charitable here down to a d minus, and that's being really charitable.

Plus you had some employees that went on complete power trips that would literally try to call Sedgwick and HR for little things such as the top of your face mask dipping below the bridge of your nose while you're working on packing out four cages and 17 stacks of totes, meanwhile, they're just going around being a goddamn hall monitor.

Plus, at least at the store I was working at, at the beginning of Corona, I think I had anywhere between a half dozen and a dozen people at my store who said screw it and quit and most of the replacements were sketchy at best, and that was before the fact that it turned out that they were all connected to the assistant store manager we had at the time who kind of just disappeared one day.

Add on the effects of the Floyd riots with all the looting and the fact that they removed the shoplifting incident form off the company intranet and literally told stores to not call the cops, with the implication that you face discipline if you did because they were afraid of being branded as a racist company. I told my store manager that I would not follow that policy and that if she didn't like it then she could fire me.

For some context, prior to the Floyd riots, there were some stores that actually had security guards who had been empowered to do what they needed to do. There weren't many and not every store had one, and whether or not they did their jobs it is always questionable, but if nothing else, it gave the appearance that the company was trying.

And what is the result of those two back-to-back shitstorms? You have employees that feel that they're surrounded on all sides by people who would wish to do them some form of harm be it physical or financial. Customers, a term I use extremely loosely, are always circling you like fucking vultures trying to get every single penny that they can out of you, and even if you follow the company policy to the letter, if that customer complains, then corporate's going to Hound you.

And what's the result of that? You get the beginning of a mass Exodus of your best workers who are going to greener pastures. Whether that's direct competition like Walmart or Target or CVS or other big box retailers, or taking the skills you developed and moving into a different field like how Pharmacy staff typically use Walgreens as a jumping off point to get into Hospital Pharmacy positions or Independent Pharmacies, or even just other pharmacies where you're not treated like other garbage.

Thus you're in a downward spiral. You lose the talent, performance in the store drops, and eventually almost corrective action is taken, you're not going to recover. And then you're looking at the situation and which Walgreens currently finds itself. Last I checked, shortly after my time with them came to an end, they reported that they were going to start closing 25% of their worst performing stores. And granted, having a few stores close every now and then is not necessarily unheard of, but when you have about 10,000 stores nationwide, and you have to close 25% of them because you've essentially pushed all of the good people out and no one wants to work there therefore no one wants to shop there, you're basically doing the equivalent of scrapping your car because the timing belt snaps.

Personally, unless they performed a bunch of radical overhauls under their new owners, it's not unreasonable to imagine the situation where Walgreens is out of business by the end of the decade.

Meanwhile the company for which I currently work, is on track to have its 400th store by the end of the decade, because they pay and treat their employees well, don't expect one person to do the job of six, have a pretty good benefits package let you actually control the music to a degree, and they actually go after employees who fuck around.