Corporate is killing the business with budget cuts. - Shift Lead Walgreens Employee Review

- Pay is poor adequate. This time last year it was fair for management but has since had a management position eliminated. This came with a minimum 4k a year downgrade in pay for that position, and even a promotion from that downgrade doesn't bring those back to what they were at before. Heck, even another promotion on top of that doesn't bring those back to that pay! New Assistant Managers and General Managers start 10-20k less than what they did 2 years ago. It's still poor for entry level positions (50-75 cents above min wage), nothing has changed there and turnover is very high due to that. General managers can ask for an increase in starting pay for exceptional applicants, generally in the area of .5 to $1.00 an hour, but this will come in as a negative to the district manager down the road. In 3 years I've seen this approved only twice. - Many new self-contradicting policies. A new large focus on customer service these last few months, which is great, but this came at the same time as many new kpi's (key performance indicators) which are extremely time consuming and take time away from customers. Focusing on said kpi's may give you 15 hrs for the customer, 25 on doing these daily tasks in a week. -Bizarre inventory system. Uses a program from the early 80's. It consistently orders items which you do not need based off of "forecasts" which are nearly always wrong. In addition, it is a negative toward the kpi to adjust orders. This is not only wasted payroll, but leads to inflated inventory and high loss of expired items. Walgreens throws more away than any store I've ever seen in my 20 years of retail experience. -Management makes the bulk of the payroll (in $ and in hours) in an average store. My store is budgeted at approx 400 hours per week and the management is 210 of that. Management doesn't really manage, from shift leads to assistant managers to general managers, they are the workhorses cause the rest of the available hours are basically just going to cashiers. -Related to the last point, but there is a severe lack of hours budgeted to the stores. On Thanksgiving, Black Friday, New Years Eve, and Christmas Day the closing manager was there by themselves with one cashier for the last 2-3 hours the store was open. An hour to an hour and a half of that time is spent in the office by the manager counting down the money. That means that a barely above minimum wage cashier is alone in the store. That's just not bad customer service it's outright dangerous in a place like Corpus Christi. It's the same in the pharmacy too. 2 pharmacists, 2 full time techs, and 1 part time tech cannot adequately run a pharmacy that is open 76 hours a week and averages 350 scripts.