Aristo! Aristo! A la lanterne!: A moral with a story.

Thursday, April 10, 2025

A moral with a story.

Let's jump straight to the moral: Don't assume something is so just because somebody tells you it is.

The story.

So there I wuz, fresh outa the doc's office and suddenly assigned to take insulin shots. The med I had been taking, which worked well, was mysteriously no longer available, although it's clone by another name which sold for far more was readily available. Go figure.

I'm at our regular drug store, Rite Aid. They got the scrips, sure, but there's a problem. They can't fully fill the insulin, and the required disposable needles for the injector pens are sold separate... and here's the fun part... I was required to deal with their 3rd party diabetic supply supplier. Uh huh, okay.

A day later I get a call from India and they say they are the supplier and they need all my insurance info in order to 'give me an estimate'. That began two weeks of calls and texts where one rep said pictures of the ID cards are fine while the other rep says NO, They MUST be EMAILED!!!! and yet another rep says what insurance?

After two weeks, they graciously texted me to say my 'share' was going to be $22 a month, and please hand over a credit card.

Um... no. You see, by that point I had checked on Amazon for that part number, and ShaZaaM! A 6 month supply of the needles was about $15. Not $15 a month. 6 months for $15. You might be able to guess, I declined the services of the Rite Aid referred India supply house, and their 2000% markup.

As long as I found that on Amazon, I checked out their pharmacy option. Well dang, they have all my meds, take my insurance, AND have a program where my entire charge for everything, total, is $5 a month. Rite Aid had been hitting me up for almost $100 a month PLUS my insurance. Yeah, our whole family switched to Amazon, happily ever after. Rite Aid lost 4 well medicated customers in one hit, and Tousands and Tousands a year in business.

So what happened to Rite Aid? Bankruptcy, going out of business, store going empty till they board it up. Guess their business model stopped working. If they hadn't been such thieving %$#@& we would have still used them for emergency meds and OTC stuff. Thankfully I chose not to accept their line of bovine exhaust and checked for myself. Thus, the moral.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Robert Heinlein

"Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.

But there is no reward at all for doing what other people expect of you, and to do so is not merely difficult, but impossible. It is easier to deal with a footpad than it is with the leech who wants "just a few minutes of your time, please — this won't take long." Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few. If you allow yourself to fall into the vice of agreeing to such requests, they quickly snowball to the point where these parasites will use up 100 percent of your time — and squawk for more!
So learn to say No — and to be rude about it when necessary.
Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you.

(This rule does not mean that you must not do a favor for a friend, or even a stranger. But let the choice be yours. Don't do it because it is "expected" of you.)"