Retail pharmacy. My company ~2 years ago decided to start offering clinical services to patients - great! In my store, they walled off part of what used to be the stockroom, expanding our waiting area and giving us a dedicated vaccination room (previously in a sectioned off part of the waiting room) and a health care room (where all the new services went).
To support these new services we got all kinds of really fancy tech - 20 inch 1440p (?) touchscreens for check-in. Very high end blood pressure machines. Two (2) computers in the healthcare room for the one (1) healthcare provider, because, you never know. These changes can be seen in a majority of this company’s stores.
If you haven’t guessed by now, they’ve decided to not go through with those clinical services. All of the tech we bought (if I had to estimate, very conservatively, $15k USD for my store) is either reboxed or installed but powered off on the sales floor, has been for ~12-18 months, and has no plans of ever being repurposed or sold. The vaccination room serves zero additional purpose to the area we had before, and the “healthcare room” is now used as the pharmacy stockroom (since, y’know, they removed part of the stockroom to build it). This is all ignoring the money spent on actually building these rooms (with lighting and climate control nicer than the rest of the store) and profits lost during construction.
But we don’t have enough money for raises, or enough hours to functionally staff the pharmacy 🙃
If the company wasn’t constantly buying stupid shit like this and spending money on the most inefficient systems ever, I’d be more inclined to agree with you.
Idiotic business decisions are the recurring costs.
Example: We have a new program in place that is supposed to “balance” inventory across locations. My pharmacy has sent and received the same specialty medication back and forth to another location on the other side of the country 3 times now, with neither location having actual need for the medication. I’m sure we’ve got a good corporate deal with FedEx, but there’s expenses outside of shipping costs (namely pharmacy labor hours) that we’re expending to literally just ship a box back and forth across the country. And if we don’t do it, they’ll come harassing us to see what the “issue” is.
If it makes you feel any better an executive got a bonus for having the great idea and another got a bonus for realizing it was dumb and pulling the plug before more money was spent.
It’s not just in education.
Retail pharmacy. My company ~2 years ago decided to start offering clinical services to patients - great! In my store, they walled off part of what used to be the stockroom, expanding our waiting area and giving us a dedicated vaccination room (previously in a sectioned off part of the waiting room) and a health care room (where all the new services went).
To support these new services we got all kinds of really fancy tech - 20 inch 1440p (?) touchscreens for check-in. Very high end blood pressure machines. Two (2) computers in the healthcare room for the one (1) healthcare provider, because, you never know. These changes can be seen in a majority of this company’s stores.
If you haven’t guessed by now, they’ve decided to not go through with those clinical services. All of the tech we bought (if I had to estimate, very conservatively, $15k USD for my store) is either reboxed or installed but powered off on the sales floor, has been for ~12-18 months, and has no plans of ever being repurposed or sold. The vaccination room serves zero additional purpose to the area we had before, and the “healthcare room” is now used as the pharmacy stockroom (since, y’know, they removed part of the stockroom to build it). This is all ignoring the money spent on actually building these rooms (with lighting and climate control nicer than the rest of the store) and profits lost during construction.
But we don’t have enough money for raises, or enough hours to functionally staff the pharmacy 🙃
One time annuitised vs recurring costs.
If the company wasn’t constantly buying stupid shit like this and spending money on the most inefficient systems ever, I’d be more inclined to agree with you.
Idiotic business decisions are the recurring costs.
Example: We have a new program in place that is supposed to “balance” inventory across locations. My pharmacy has sent and received the same specialty medication back and forth to another location on the other side of the country 3 times now, with neither location having actual need for the medication. I’m sure we’ve got a good corporate deal with FedEx, but there’s expenses outside of shipping costs (namely pharmacy labor hours) that we’re expending to literally just ship a box back and forth across the country. And if we don’t do it, they’ll come harassing us to see what the “issue” is.
The most efficient economic system ever conceived
If it makes you feel any better an executive got a bonus for having the great idea and another got a bonus for realizing it was dumb and pulling the plug before more money was spent.
Walgreens?