September 2021 by Shelli M.
Wow. I now know firsthand why this particular King Soopers pharmacy has such epically bad ratings/reviews. I am here from out of state and had several prescriptions called in from my doctor. I am currently in a bedrest situation, and someone else was going to pick up my prescription for me. I did this last month in Boulder with no problem, but this location in Lafayette would not take a credit card over the phone like Boulder was able to. After a very long hold time today, a very nice but seemingly new pharmacy employee, a young woman, advised me that I could set up pre-pay using their app. I asked if I could do it on the web, but she told me I had to do it on the app. After downloading the app, and creating my account, I went to set up my pharmacy profile, and it bounced me out to the web anyway (so I *could* have done the entire thing in my web browser to begin with). To make a long struggle a short story, if you haven't already filled a prescription with that location, there is no way to associate your patient info with new prescriptions.I called back, and after another hold, a different woman answered the phone. I recapped the story thus far, and she was likely the person the younger woman asked about taking a credit card over the phone, as she was already sounding quite additudinal, and launched into the "It's Not Our Policy" speech. I practically had to interrupt to say, yes, yes, I understand, and that I had moved on to trying to use the app (and web site) as I'd been instructed. This marked the short period of us working together to try to diagnose the problem; she gave me one of the Rx numbers they were currently filling for me to see if that could associate my account with my prescriptions so that I could set up online payment, but (unsurprisingly; it's just not that sophisticated of a system) it did not. I asked for alternatives, and she went and got a printed write-up of instructions on how to do all the steps I'd already just done. I am a techie who had a career in web development and Internet technology, and her reading all this out to me was just like tech support asking you if your computer is plugged in when you called to try to troubleshoot a compiler error. I didn't mean to be rude and interrupt, but she did say it was several pages and what with the long holds, it sounded like they were pretty busy and I didn't want to waste her time. (And did I mention I was supposed to be flat on my back and not sitting up stressing on the phone?) So I tried to tell her that I really did get past all these steps and have an account and got to the right place, that I used to develop this kind of stuff and understood why it was failing (and honestly, it probably isn't a bad idea that it did, for patient/HIPAA security). I'm not sure if she was agitated at that or she was just having a bad day or what, but at this point she was pretty much ranting at me that she she didn't know what to tell me. I asked if she had any other suggestions for me, but she snapped that she had given me plenty of "options" (she didn't, but the only one I could see was "screw your cerebrospinal fluid leak; get up, drive here, and present your credit card"), that she (and I quote) wasn't going to argue with me, and then she... hung up on me. I have been wracking my brain, trying to remember if I have EVER been hung up on by anyone in a customer support function, and I don't think I ever have! (And in my work I have had to deal with phone companies a LOT, so that's really saying something.) I mean, this is Colorado. People are nice here. *I'm* nice. This felt like East Coast impatience and rudeness at its worst. (No offense, East Coasters! I'm a native East Coaster too!)I picked the King Soopers in Lafayette because I used the one in Boulder for the 20 years that I lived here, and actually used it last month to fill this same exact set of out-of-state scrips, and to get my third COVID-19 shot to boot. King Soopers Sunrise Center in Bould