I had an occasion to visit with one of my friends, an older gentleman in the pharmacy profession, one I like to call a seasoned pharmacist. When I stopped by to visit with him, he usually had a good story to share. Here is his story for that day:
-“When I was starting out in pharmacy, I took a job with a major chain pharmacy located in a large retirement community in Florida. There were 12 stores in our district, and when I started to work for them, we were number 8 out of the 12. We were always picked on to increase Rx sales (I suppose not much has changed over the years!). My partner and I always wondered how we were supposed to do that, were we supposed to go out on the sidewalk and force people to get their prescriptions filled at our store? Our District Manager would come into the store and complain about our Rx volume. Our Pharmacy Supervisor would brazenly come into the pharmacy and start taking unopened bottles off the shelf to go back to the wholesaler. In this instant, the chain owned a warehouse. Of course, after he left, we would reorder what he took off the shelf so that we would have stock. My partner and I disliked having to fill partial prescriptions, then fill the remainder so the patient would have to make a separate trip to the store. We did not have delivery services in those days at chains. My partner and I resented the pharmacy supervisor because of this.
One day as we were working with an electric typewriter (we were the modern store because the other stores still had manual typewriters), answering the phone (the pharmacy answered the phone for the entire store), typing labels, looking up paper prescription refills from the filing system and manually filling out insurance forms (this was before computer on-line adjudication). Our community had a large population of retired auto workers who had health insurance as part of their retirement. Of course, most of them were paid in cash, but we had to fill out their forms for them to get reimbursed. There were some that had insurance with co-pays, but we still had to fill out the forms by hand with NDC numbers, cost of the Rx, dispensing fee, and total. These had to be legible because, like I said, they were filled out by hand and processed by hand at the insurance company. If they were sent back to us by the insurance company, we had to correct them and re-send them. What a pain!
Anyway, one day as my partner and I were working our tails off, one of us said, not sure if it was him or me, but we sort of came to the same idea together- wouldn’t it be fun to pretend that this was our store, it just had the chains name on the front. That was the day my partner and I discovered Ownership and what it means. Immediately, we started treating our patients as if they were coming into our personal store; we would smile and start asking about their families, where they were from, and even how they were doing on their medications (almost like a clinical pharmacist). We would acknowledge them when they came into our store. We learned to look up from the counter and typewriter and see our people. Our customers started coming in more often for advice on OTCs and their Rx medications. It was fun, and it became something to look forward to each day we came to work. It didn’t take long before the customers responded and would ask for us by name when they came into the store. Since this was a retirement community, patients would have visitors from the north come to town. They would bring their visitors and bring them down to our store to introduce us as their pharmacists. Sometimes we would get a prescription called in late in the evening for a spouse of one of our customers after a surgical procedure. We made it a practice to deliver the Rx ourselves after work. We would not collect the charge but said for them to come to the store at their convenience to settle up. As I said earlier, chains did not deliver in those days. It was amazing what doing things like that did for our business. Within a year of starting to own the store, we went from the number 8 store to number 1 in the district! In addition, we had no more complaints from the District Manager and certainly not from the Pharmacy Supervisor. When you are number 1, your managers don’t complain.
I suppose the point of this story is that the concept of ownership changed our pharmacy and us. We became friends with our customers, and life was good. I have carried that concept of ownership to every position I have ever been in, and it has been a good strategy over the years. You see, when you own something, you care for it, you nurture it, and you are careful with it. The people you serve can sense that ownership, and they cannot help but trust you. Own your position, wherever you are, whatever your position. And one more thing Own your profession, care for it, nurture it, and be careful with it, that is the way to be a professional- Own it!”
What do you think?