Oh my God, I was just going to leave a review about the awful experience I just had at the pharmacy here, but I see other reviewers have already covered it great detail. But I'll describe it anyway.
After going to a nearby urgent health care and being diagnosed with the flu, I headed over to Duane Reade to pick up my prescriptions. I have a fever, chills, delirium from the fever, and I just want to get my Tamiflu into my system and start recovering.
The line is halfway to the back of the store, and of course they only have two of the three registers covered. I was starving and decided to get dinner, since the prescription was certainly not going to be ready yet.
I come back a half hour later, wait on the line, and the woman tells me they never received the prescription. I want to be clear, the urgent care is stellar, and I'm sure the prescription was sent. I go back to urgent care and tell them, the PA rolls his eyes, making it clear that this is something they deal with with Duane Reade often. He suggests in the future I use CVS, and I agree; there just isn't a CVS close to my apartment. He sends the prescription to DR again. I go back, wait in line again, the same woman tells me they got it, and they're working on it now.
I go sit in the waiting area. She knows I'm waiting. After the other people waiting have gotten their prescriptions, I decide to go up and check on the status of mine. Almost an hour has passed. I have been sitting in the waiting area for an hour, in full view of this woman. The other cashier is sitting on the floor sorting prescriptions, and the woman who was helping me is shuffling handfuls of prescriptions around from the pharmacist area to the bins in the customer service area. No customers are being helped. The line is around 10 people long.
Finally she comes back to her register and pulls up my account and tells me that they don't have the Ibuprofen and need to order it. I say no problem, it's just Ibuprofen; it's the Tamiflu I need. She wanders off and eventually comes back and tells me they don't have that either. I will admit I was a bit irate at that point. She let me sit there for an hour. She says she can check if the Steinway location has it. I assume she decided not to bother since I was being a jerk at that point, so she just went back to helping the line and ignored me.
I left. I went back to urgent care. They resent the prescription to CVS on Steinway. I walked around to CVS. There were only 5 people ahead of me on line. The prescriptions were ready for me when I got to the counter.
Avoid the Duane Reade on Broadway and 35th. They do not care about their customers, and i don't blame them, TBH. Under serving customers is a corporate policy. Think about how many Duane Reades and Walgreens have been shut down in the neighborhood the past few years. How can they not have enough pharmacists, or enough cashiers to cover three registers when they've put dozens of pharmacists and cashiers out of work in the past few years?
I work in a retail environment for a very successful company that has built its success on the simple idea that the customer comes first. Everything we do takes a backseat to making sure customers are served. The idea of a customer asking me for something, going to find that we don't have it, and then just going back to work and leaving the customer standing around for an hour is just astonishing to me. And at Duane Reade, it's literally corporate policy to treat its customers that way. read more