KANSAS CITY - For the past few weeks, people have been asking on Nextdoor why Walgreens pharmacies are open sporadically or not at all, and it's not just at a couple of the pharmacies. KMOX's Maria Keena started looking into these complaints and discovered this was just the tip of the iceberg.
The complaints come pouring in
Some 300 people reached out to KMOX with story after story about Walgreens pharmacies being closed in the middle of the day with no explanation, and when people try to go to another nearby Walgreens, that pharmacy is closed too. We are intentionally not using names.
"There was no one there. The sign outside said "pharmacist not available."
"It's a Walgreens on Lindell in St. Louis and my experience has been that the pharmacy just randomly closes when there's no pharmacist available. I finally gave up about a month and a half ago and transferred my prescriptions"
"I called my psychiatrist and I said, hey, I need my medication, can you guys call the pharmacy? And they sent me a message, which I have if you need it, and it says in the message they were unable to reach the pharmacy and they had been on the phone for 30 minutes."
We heard complaints from the Rock Hill pharmacy on Manchester, from Hampton and Chippewa, from Crestwood....
A heart transplant patient tells us her medication can be the difference between life and death.
Walgreens isn't the only one
Walgreens isn't the only big pharmacy dealing with customer issues. Other chain pharmacies are as well, says local pharmacist Jerry Callahan, who owns and operates two independent Medicine Shoppe pharmacies in Pacific and Elsberry, Missouri.
"They say, to be polite, the service is terrible because they don't have enough help - they don't have enough pharmacists."
The big problem he says are the PBMs - pharmacy benefit manager groups.
"The real reason is they're underpaying everybody, they're putting independent pharmacies out of business."
What's the solution?
"This is a scandal," says retail industry consultant Burt Flickinger. "And nobody in government is doing anything about it."
He says Walgreens has been tossed around among owners lately, and the latest ones didn't know what was happening in their stores.
"From the best of times, for over 100 years under Walgreens family management, to the worst of times under private equity management, under foreign management, under Boots management."
Walgreens is being sold to a private equity firm.
Flickinger is usually hired by companies or their investors, or prospective buyers, to evaluate the business. So it's a big deal for him to say, in reaction to the pharmacy fumbles: "I'm not litigious by nature, but the answer is litigation."
He says state AGs should go after companies for both predatory pricing and anti-competitive practices.
Flickinger says CVS is also encountering a bump in the road, but not nearly at the scale of Walgreens', whose stock has lost 71% of its value in the last four years.
KMOX reached out to a Walgreens Corporate media spokesperson for answers. We were advised he'd get back to us by Wednesday. He did not.