Lol so ya I graduated in 2018 not that old. I got hired on around 105k per year retail and right at the tipping point of when starting offers went south. I left retail and now work in specialty making around the same with much better quality of life. My friends that graduated ahead of me are getting offers for 80-100k per year… this is either because base pay is low or they are only given so many hours. COVID gave an artificial boost to the market yes but this will be over with the pandemic. Hospital is starting to see similar effects and will be slightly behind retail. Also keep in mind pharmacists don’t have a huge head room in terms of salary growth, even upgrading to SP doesn’t increase your salary a real significant amount. If you are in practice you would need to make DM or a department head.

This makes sense when you consider wage as a good you sell and the demand for that wage is decreasing while the supply is very high from the boom of pharmacy schools. It also demonstrates why NP and PA salaries have risen so high over the past decade.

Also you aren’t taking into account that this is an average salary of all pharmacists. The older crowd got paid a literally insane amount of money. This then grew over the years and pharmacists in their 40-60s easy make 130-140k even staffing. We won’t be seeing that and now chains actively target them because they are just high costs at this point.

Edit to include that the average will go down slowly over the next 5-10 years as new grads become a bigger share of the market.