alt Hacker NewsVery much clueless commentary. Retail pharmacies in the US are dying dozens a day. They don't have margin to support people answering the phone like tech companies with 80% margin do. Welcome to the real world where it is survival for these pharmacies not greed or shareholder value.
They literally lose money filling your branded prescription even with no labor baked in. We are their lifeline.
I know because I am not some spoiled tech worker who stumbled into this industry. I ran these pharmacies for over a decade before ever writing a line of code.
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Why were pharmacies viable before? Presumably they didn't lose money for their whole history.
Clueless? You sound tone deaf. If you came here thinking everyone would love your product becase AI, well, sorry about that.
Just because you think it is an amazing product does not mean the rest of us will agree with you. It's right up there with "I've never had a problem with it so anyone claiming to have a problem is wrong" mentality. It was your comment acknowledging the public does not like your product or products like yours. You just think your product is better than others. That may be true but it again does not mean it is so good that the public enjoys interacting with your product.
Retail pharmacies in the US are dying dozens a day.
I have a lot of pharmacist relatives. This is news to them.
> We are their lifeline.
Yeaaaah, I don't think that's true at all but I am glad it makes you feel virtuous and helpful.
PBMs, private equity, and health insurance companies are what are crushing pharmacy margins. AI voice assistants will not last as a solution imho.
https://nashp.org/state-tracker/state-pharmacy-benefit-manag...
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-the-break-up-of-big-...
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/inside-the-mafia-of-pharm...
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-real-reason-walgreens...
> But the real reason Walgreens, and the pharmacy business in general, is dying, is because of a failure to enforce antitrust laws against unfair business methods and illegal mergers. Elson touched on it when he mentioned lower reimbursement rates, but I don’t think people appreciate the full scope of what happened to Walgreens, and to the full pharmacy business in general. This is not a case of bad management, it’s a case of desperate management.
First, most tech companies of comparable size to your customers have negative margins and survive on investment cycles, and the tech companies that are bigger haven't offered human support to anyone in decades. (And indeed, everyone already resents this practice and those tech companies. Generally, sentiment is abyssmal.)
I know you're just trying to illustrate the real plight of your customers, but it's a bad illustration that confuses the discussion.
Second, out of sincere curiosity: what was the future of the industry -- and these particular pharmacies -- if AI hadn't arrived to offer salvation? The role they fill in society is non-optional, so how the market restructuring around these infeasibly narrow margins before?