> I wonder why no one brought that up as a solution?

Ooh! Ooh! I'm a local! I've used Kinney Drugs before.

They literally just can't find the work in the middle of nowhere (on top of not paying living wages). This region is a vast desert and we've lost every other major pharmacy.

"Living wage" up here is also kinda tricky because supposedly people seem to live just fine on minimum wage up here (provided you somehow had good enough credit to get housing in the first place). Things are /generally/ cheap, but there's still an unspoken "the boomers are just fine because they already own their house" up here.

We can't support a Walgreens, we can't support a CVS, we can barely support Walmart pharmacies. All you have for a choice up here is Kinney Drugs or Walmart Pharmacy.

And on top of that, as a former Kinney customer (pre-Burt): they really didn't do a good job in the first place. They suck.

I disagree that "AI" is the major issue on top of Kinney's problems, they've also recently transitioned to a "centralized filling" system in prior months that has caused quite frankly the largest amounts of frustration among customers. They continually fail to fill prescriptions that come into the local pharmacies, instead sending them out to central fill, and every time you show up at the pharmacy it's a "come back tomorrow" because it didn't come on the truck. At this point I don't even back down from that like the rest of the elderly customers, I perk up, tell them it's bullshit, they have stock, and suddenly the teenager punches a few buttons and go "we can have it ready in 20 minutes sir".

But yes, the Burt IVR bullshit is also equally bad and they really keep peddling it in the stores. I've wanted to punch the stupid cardboard standee in the face a couple times.