This month’s jaunt into the DrakeGTA Archives: An article (and mini-rant) about Walgreens!
Fucking Walgreens, man.
Recently my girlfriend got some photos printed up at our local Walgreens. So while we were out and about we made the stop to pick them up.
We get to the photo counter, and of course it’s unattended. She presses the customer service needed button to page someone, and we wait a couple of minutes. While she’s waiting for an employee to show up, I figured I’d do some shopping of my own.
I got LASIK back in June, and one of the minor downsides that comes with getting LASIK is occasional dry eyes. I was running low on my artificial tears, so I figured rather than order them from Amazon I’d just grab them while we were at Walgreens.
Unfortunately, our local Walgreens has taken to locking virtually everything up. Also unfortunately, they apparently have only one key for the entire fucking store. After pressing the customer service button and getting nobody, I flagged down an employee stocking shelves and asked if she could unlock the artificial tears. The employee looked confused, so I explained again that I needed someone to unlock the artificial tears.
“No English.”
Are you fucking kidding me?!
I asked this bitch if she was fucking with me. Her awkward and confused stare made it apparent that she legitimately didn’t speak English.
This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened to me, many years ago at Kmart me and a friend asked an employee for help, and the employee didn’t speak English. We got thrown out of the store after my friend (Heston from our History With Heston feature) went on a semi-racist but still completely valid tirade about how employees who can’t speak English shouldn’t be working at an American business, or at least on the sales floor where customers are.
I held up one of my own keys, and signed towards the artificial tears. She just looked at me, shook her head, and went back to stocking the shelf.
Oh fuck this. Guess I’m ordering the drops from Amazon.
I went back to my girlfriend, who after 10 minutes managed to get someone to help her with her photos. I asked the person at the photo counter if anyone could unlock the artificial tears. Apparently the person with the key was on break and left the premises. I asked why only one person in the building has a key, and got nothing more than a shrug.
As we were in line to pay for the photos, I remembered that I also needed to pick up a gift card for someone. Thankfully gift cards weren’t behind lock and key, so I grabbed the gift card and got to the register, only to be told “Sorry, cash only for gift cards.”
At this point I was about ready to skip reading somebody the Riot Act and go straight to putting my foot up people’s asses, and this fucking jerk off cashier telling me that I couldn’t use my debit card to pay for a gift card was going to be patient zero of the ass-kicking epidemic that was about to be let loose on Walgreens. This asshole was very clearly running a scam, and while I didn’t give two fucks if he screwed Walgreens out of money I knew this scam would involve my gift card not getting activated properly.
After 11 years together, my girlfriend knows me well enough to know when a storm is coming, and before I could say or do something that would probably end with us getting permanently banned from all Walgreens everywhere she told the cashier “Nevermind then” and ushered me out of the store. What a shit show.
Anyway, I was looking for my next DrakeGTA Archives article, when I came across one titled “A big giant fuck you for Walgreens”. The timing couldn’t have been better. Fuck you Walgreens, seriously.
This article, originally published to DrakeGTA.com in January of 2011, has less to do with bad customer service and more to do with them selling a homeopathic pain ointment.
As an RN (Registered Nurse), Drake had a pretty good understanding of medicine and medical-related stuff. I guess that’s why he took umbrage to roll-on lidocaine being marketed as “nerve pain relief”? I don’t know, I’ve usually had success with lidocaine and muscle pain, and I don’t think there’s anything “homeopathic” about lidocaine.
I don’t know what Drake was thinking when he posted this on his site (as an RN you’d think he’d have known better than to call lidocaine a homeopathic remedy), but the article is a good example of the kinds of things Drake posted on the AJnet Forums (as was my tangent about Walgreens). I suspect that the reason he stopped updating DrakeGTA.com was because he started posting his stuff on the forum instead.
I don’t really have much else to say here. I’m just pissed at Walgreens and finding out that Drake posted an article called “A big giant fuck you for Walgreens” is almost cathartic, and I’m not going to pass up this opportunity.
This is “A big giant fuck you for Walgreens”, originally published to DrakeGTA.com on January 14, 2011.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, I do not like to muddle my online personality with my real life. This is mostly because the internet is full of assholes, creeps, and weirdo stalkers who would like to wear my body as a skinsuit for their high-school reunion. However, today I make an important exception.
My youngest child had a recent case of the sick. For those of you who do not work in healthcare, it works like this: If you treat a cold, it last about seven days, if you don’t treat a cold, it last about a week. Knowing this, I took my daughter to the doctor, knowing it wouldn’t do any good, wanting a note saying my kid was good to go back to daycare.
Long story short, and $400 later, (with good insurance,) I’m at Walgreens waiting in line to drop off a prescription. Low and behold, I see this little blue bottle on the shelf. It reads “Walgreens Nerve Pain Relief.” I immediately, thought, “Wow, nerve pain, I didn’t know that Neurontin was now over the counter.”
Upon closer inspection, it turns out I was wrong, it wasn’t Neurotin (Gabapentin) at all. The little blue bottle bearing the trusted Walgreens name was a “homeopathic remedy.” For those of you unfamiliar with the time honored practice of homeopathy, it works like this. Say you have the shits, you take something that gives you the shits, but since that’s just stupid, they say that the more you dilute it, the stronger it gets, so most homeopathic medicine is “maximum strength” which means pretty much straight tap water. It’s bullshit, it’s worse than bullshit, it’s expensive bullshit that would make the symptoms worse if not for the fact that all homeopathic cures are diluted to the point of total uselessness.
Now someone else might have just let this go, but not me. I am an upstanding representative of the consumer, I stand up for the little guy. So I did what any reasonable person would have done in a similar situation. In protest, I immediately dropped trow and took a shit on their floor, right there, in isle #10.
Of course, I had to come back about three hours later and pick up my daughter’s prescription, which made things awkward, but the moral of the story, fuck you Walgreens, with your snake oil cures. We expect that kind of shit from people like Whole Foods, but coming from the largest chain pharmacy in America, that’s just shameful.
Please eat a giant brick of shit with lumps of corn and die, sincerely, DrakeGTA.
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