CVS/Pharmacy CVS Caremark Workload Overkill and Zero Compassion for Their Employees Garden City, New York

I have been with CVS/Pharmacy for nine years.  I had nothing but a bad experience since day one.  I started with CVS fresh out of college, my problem was that I came from Ohio and I got the CVS job in New York.  I was young and naive and I didn't take into consideration of the cost of living in New York compared to Ohio.  During my second interview I asked for an Ohio salary and CVS acted like that was a hard bargain and they would see if they could match my asking offer.  The next day they accepted my offer, and I started the job making $10,000.00 dollars less than what I should have made.  A year later a store manager found out how much I made and talked to corporate for me and got me the difference.  Good job on the DM for low balling me, but thanks for nothing to CVS on integrity.

Starting off with CVS they put me into a fast pace program to train me to become a store manager.  The deadline to complete the training was a month, the store manager was responsible for training and to certify myself in modules to be compliant with the deadline.  The only thing wrong with this situation is that CVS is notorious for cutting hours and putting more tasks on everyone's plate.  With that said, the store manager has more than enough tasks to handle, and so store managers love to cut corners in training people to meet company deadlines.  By certifying assistant store managers prior to their deadlines shows corporate that the store manager is doing their job, but in actuality they are not.  So, long story short, assistant managers are not trained to do their jobs, and when they become store managers.....well you know where I am going with that.

Every year corporate cuts hours, increase financial budgets, add more/new tasks and programs, shorten deadlines, and expect you to still meet deadlines and be compliant with company and state policies.  You can only cut so much and expect you to do so much.  The company is so big that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.  You have the Loss Prevention Manager telling you to do one thing, and then you have the District Store Manager telling you to do the same thing completely different, and on top of that you have the District Pharmacy Manager telling you to do the same thing a totally different way.  So when you decide to do the task one way, you will have two authority figures yelling at you and writing you up for not doing it correctly.  CVS constantly changes the way to represent the store only to go back to the original plan later in the year.  This creates more work than what is needed.  They say to work smarter than harder, but yet they don't take their own advice.

The ordering process is ridiculous.  The store managers place the orders on a weekly basis, which is understandable.  They know what sells and they have their own plans to meet certain program criteria.  Corporate on the other hand places their own orders, not knowing what each store has in their backrooms, which usually comes in ridiculous amounts.  This of course creates a huge amount of overstock which creates problems for space for upcoming events and state policies such as fire marshall clearance.  Corporate will come in and scream at you for not being compliant with the guidelines, and question you why you have so much overstock.  When you tell them that you want to create a display on the sales floor to move product and to free up the backroom, corporate will tell you not to do it because it will create clutter.  When you ask them for a plan of action, they can not give it to you, they brush it off by telling you that it's a store problem and you have to deal with it.

I have seen good to excellent store manager loose their jobs for petty, small, mundane things, while cashiers get away with gross violations of company policy.  Manager used to be in charge of their own stores, and corporate took that away from them.  Managers are not allowed to hire people until they get the approval from the HR Manager, which takes forever.  By the time the manager gets the approval the new hire has already decided to look for better opportunities.  Managers are not allowed to write up and/or terminate people with out the approval of the District Store Manager.  Once again same scenario as dealing with the HR Manager.

To wrap this up CVS will over work you, not pay you overtime, expect the world and then some from you, and when you do not perform to their standards they will terminate you with out any warning, or any course of retraining you to improve you or the store.  Every store has the same deadlines, expectations, and responsibilities but every store has a different set up.  Some store have 600 plus hours a week and they can somewhat meet these demands, while other stores have roughly 300 hours and are expected to perform the same way the higher volume stores do.