Walgreens Cashier Gets Told to Work in the Pharmacy, Gives Out Wrong Medication
Published Nov. 28 2023, 5:45 p.m. ET
She is pulling double duty
I don't want to be reductive when it comes to pharmacists, but I truly don't understand what they do. I have no doubt it's complicated work. After all, one has to obtain a Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD) degree which involves two years at undergrad with a focus on pharmacy work followed by four years of professional study. That's a decent number of years!
On the outside, it does feel like they are largely responsible for taking medication from one location and moving it to a bottle for the patient. I'm sure it's more than that, but it certainly does involve counting pills. That being said, I wouldn't want a teenager working as a cashier at a drugstore chain to suddenly be elevated to pharmacist. As impossible as that seems, it happened to one girl on TikTok.
Ya gotta keep 'em separated.
Call us crazy but we think pharmacists should work at pharmacies.
In a TikTok from December 2022, Amanda, who goes by @djmandyd on TikTok, tells a fairly innocuous story about driving with a flat tire. What is most interesting about it, is the fact that Amanda reveals she is only a teenager. This information is relevant when it comes to another incident she references in a later TikTok.
A year later Amanda reveals that while she was working as a cashier at Walgreens, the popular retail drugstore "forced her" to work at the pharmacy. While doing that, Amanda accidentally gave patients unmixed amoxicillin. Thankfully amoxicillin is only an antibiotic but too much can lead to kidney failure.
Clearly there was more to this story, so Amanda satisfied curious viewers by dropping a follow-up TikTok. In response to a commenter who said this sounded illegal, Amanda said it wasn't. She actually did have a pharmacy tech license which isn't really a flex.
According to Amanda, where she's from there is "nothing to having that license." Getting one involves "filling out a bunch of paperwork and paying a fee." If only a driver's license was this easy. I'm kidding! People should be tested way more than they are because cars can be killing machines.
While Amanda was working at Walgreens as a cashier, her manager apparently begged her to get a pharmacy tech license. It sounds as if Walgreens, a company that made over $132 billion in 2022, was short-staffed and didn't want to hire someone for the pharmacy. The math is not mathing.
Her manager was in such dire need of a pharmacy employee that she paid the fee needed for Amanda to get that license. It's like Great Expectations but awful! We'll call it Low Expectations.
To no one's surprise, the company that asked a teen cashier to pop into the pharmacy didn't do a very good job of training her. "If you ever worked at Walgreens you know all the training is you sit in a room and watch a bunch of videos back to back to back," she said. Amanda was woefully under prepared.
She was led to believe this would be a one-time thing but every time she went into work, Amanda's manager begged her to work in the pharmacy at the back of the store. Amanda didn't like it at the pharmacy because everyone was mean and far too busy to actually show her what to do.
Things finally came to a head when Amanda had what she describes as an "amoxicillin incident." This was referenced in her prior TikTok when Amanda stated she gave someone unmixed amoxicillin. It ended up being fine after they called the customer and had him come back up to Walgreens. The really shocking information comes at the very end when Amanda reveals this happened "last year." She is a teenager now. How old was she then? We have more questions.
