OK, so I know I've written about Triple S before, and what utter bullshit it is, and wondered aloud why CVS' upper management team (AKA:The Ivory Tower Boys) put such stock in its questionable subjective results, but I just went through an incident that shows in a nutshell what happens when the ITB's obsession filters down to field management.
Anyone who works in a store knows what the first week of the year brings: insurance issues. Probably 25% of the scripts you process require new insurance cards, which make more work for us at store level because we have to call the customers to tell them we need their new insurance cards, then explain to half of them that we need to see the card instead of them reading random numbers over the phone. Then when they come in to pick up their scripts you have to enter the new insurance (which hopefully works and doesn't require an additional call to the insurance company) and then the pharmacist has to go through the entire verification process all over again, all while the customer is staring holes through you wondering what's taking so long. Add to that this year in that Monday was considered a holiday by most doctors, so all the rest of our work was condensed into fewer days. Oh, and let's not forget that now that Walgreen's doesn't contract with Express Scripts we are having to do dozens of transfers on a daily basis and those are also supposed to be our priority because as we all know CVS only wants to take care of NEW customers. They don't really care once you're in the stable. Just try getting a customer's name off the refill reminder call list and tell me that CVS gives a shit about existing customers.
So here I am, working on the first Thursday of the year (which was coincidentally the day we got our warehouse delivery) and doing it short-staffed because, of course, it was a holiday week so my pharmacy supervisor shorted us hours in our budget due to projected lower volume. Don't forget that although our volume may be lower we have way more work due to the aforementioned insurance issues and Walgreen's transfers. So at 5 PM when everyone is coming in to pick up their scripts and we have the insurance edits lining up like planes queueing up at the airport my district supervisor calls to (get this) TELL THE PHARMACY MANAGER TO PRINT DOWN THE TRIPLE S SCORES BECAUSE THEY NEED TO TALK ABOUT WHAT A BAD NUMBER WE HAD!!!! What kind of a fucking moron is this guy????? Even if our Triple S had totally tanked could you use the brain that God presumably gave you and call at a less busy time? By the way, our overall number was down by a whopping 3 points, meaning we missed our overall yearly target by 1 WHOLE POINT!! OH NO, WE"RE NOT AN 'EXCELLENT STORE' ANYMORE (whatever that means).
Look, I understand that this whole pressure for Triple S is a downward pressure from the ass-hats in the Tower, but that pressure seems to cause brain damage in the people on whom it is applied. At the root of the whole issue is that you have people who have been out of the stores (or in pharmacist-speak "off the bench") for so long they forget what it's like. Yeah, they cruise the stores once in a while and observe for a few minutes, or maybe even an hour or two and they think that qualifies them as having their fingers on the pulse, but that simply isn't true. I can deal with almost anything for 5 or 10 minutes. Try it when you're in hour number 8 of a 10 or 11 hour shift day after day and tell me it's the same thing!
And maybe, just maybe, our Triple S scores could be improved if we weren't having to stop in the middle of the busiest time of day during the busiest week of the year to run a report and take a call from the pharmacy supervisor telling us how much we suck. Oh and by the way, haven't seen the final figures for 2011, but the first 3 quarters of the year saw 'same store sales' increase for every quarter over the previous year. I'm guessing this trend to continue through the end of the year, meaning our sales are increasing although our hourly budgets are shrinking. Yeah, we suck. The survey may say one thing but peoples' pocketbooks say something else entirely.
