Persnickety

When did a pharmacy become a part of the fast-food nation? You walk into a pharmacy with your prescription in hand, present it to the technician or pharmacist, and start to walk away, confident that in a few minutes you will have your medicine and begin your life anew. When did that happen? I started in this business in 1983. At that time I remember this same expectation of quick, efficient dispensing, though I also remember that a busy pharmacy back then did about 100 prescriptions a day. We were still typing labels, though a few envelope-stretching chains and independents did have computers. So if we did ten Rx's an hour that was a busy. That works out to be one Rx every 6 minutes. Nowadays we do one Rx every minute or two. (That doesn't mean you get your prescription in two minutes; it's more likely to be an hour as the volume has sky-rocketed.) But back in the Jurassic period of pharmacy, independents used to fill prescriptions in a back room, beyond the view of custome...