What are they doing back there?

I finally got my second shot today. I brought in my vaccination card, my ID and my insurance information, and the clerk at the pharmacy counter spent something like five minutes clicking through screens on her display to get everything straight. I had a hard time imagining what she could possibly be doing back there.

One thought on “What are they doing back there?”

  1. No direct answer (known or speculative) to that question, but pharmacy has become so incredibly bureaucratic. When my Dad was running his pharmacy, he would promise a six minute turn around if there was no customer physically in the store ahead of you, and that included hand counting the pills (no counting machines), hand-typing the labels on a manual typewriter with his lightning two finger hunt and peck method, and calculating the price without a computer. Insurance was rarely an issue and when it was, the co-pays were generally fixed in those days so the billing stuff could be done separately later by a clerk, so I understand that piece of it being different.

    Now you can call an hour ahead and still sit there for ten minutes after you walk in, while they do all of the whatever-it-is they do. My daughter’s a pharmacy tech and has explained some of it but I’m still not entirely clear on what takes so long.

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