I truly wish Yelp allowed negative stars because CVS Pharmacy has apparently decided that helping sick people obtain medication is more of a fun suggestion than an actual business model.
I developed a lovely COVID rash that looks like my immune system lost a bar fight. I went to urgent care at 9:00 a.m. My prescription was called in by 9:30 a.m. Thinking this was a pharmacy and not a government infrastructure project, I loitered around CVS until 11:00 waiting for my medication.
At 11:00, I called the pharmacy to ask what was going on. The employee informed me that my prescription was apparently sitting on a truck in the parking lot and would be unloaded sometime that afternoon. Or maybe tomorrow. Whenever. You know, whenever the spirit moved them.
Now, call me old-fashioned, but when someone's medical treatment is sitting twenty yards away in a parking lot, I tend to think getting it into the building might be considered a priority. Thank God this wasn't me having to pick up insulin for someone with diabetes or something more urgent.
By 2:00 p.m., my rash was getting worse, bleeding in places, and generally making me look like I had contracted a medieval plague. I finally called urgent care and asked them to transfer the prescription to Walgreens because CVS seemed committed to treating medication fulfillment like an episode of Storage Wars.
The urgent care staff was confused because they had confirmed earlier that the medication was in stock.
So urgent care called CVS.
Miraculously, twenty minutes later, I received a phone call from CVS informing me that my prescription was ready after all. Apparently there had been a "misunderstanding." The real issue, they said, was that my insurance wasn't covering the medication.
Excuse me?
How exactly is that a misunderstanding?
Your employee didn't say, "We're waiting for insurance approval."
Your employee didn't say, "There's a coverage issue."
Your employee told me my medication was sitting on a truck and might be unloaded later if the stars aligned and Mercury exited retrograde.
And if the medication wasn't covered by insurance, why was nobody planning on telling me that? I would have happily paid out of pocket hours earlier instead of sitting at home itching and bleeding while wondering if I needed an exorcism.
The most frustrating part is that I'm not just picking up prescriptions for myself. I also pick up medications for my elderly neighbor with dementia, whom I help care for. Reliability matters. Communication matters. Basic competence matters.
After this experience, CVS has lost all of my pharmacy business. Future prescriptions for both of us will be going to Walgreens, where I can only hope the medications are stored inside the building and the employees communicate in complete sentences and do not have the maturity level of high school students
As a grand finale to this circus, when the pharmacy tech finally handed me my prescription, she informed me that the pharmacist wanted to explain how to use it.
You better believe I rolled my eyes so hard my COVID headache came back.
"Seriously, bro?" I said. "I've been scratching this rash until it bleeds all day while you guys move at the speed of a DMV sloth on Xanax. I think I can figure this one out."
At this point, I was fairly confident the complicated medical instructions consisted of: open tube, apply cream to rash, try not to claw your own skin off.
I assured them that I possessed the advanced reading skills necessary to decipher the package directions all by myself. Then I planned to apply said medication while driving home in my awesome Jeep, belting out show tunes and celebrating the fact that after an entire day of waiting, I had finally obtained the prescription that was apparently trapped somewhere between a parking lot truck, an insurance issue, and a complete communication breakdown.
If your pharmacy's customer service requires intervention from urgent care before anyone can explain what's actually happening, something has gone very wrong. read more
