Heading back outside, here's a view along the left side of the store. It's looking a little the worse for wear (and I can't imagine that giant satellite dish is used for anything these days), but it probably actually looks better than the Burien one did.
I'm guessing those satellite dishes were used to share prescription data between locations in an era before computer networking as we know it today was common. Walgreens used to run commercials all the time in the late 1980s/early 1990s about their then state of the art pharmacy computer network. I assume that satellite dish at the Rite Aid is antiquated and not used in modern times, but who really knows with Rite Aid, lol.
ReplyDelete1987 Walgreens commercial showing their Intercom system: https://youtu.be/JjHD7PswjY0
1988 Walgreens commercial with 'friendly' computers: https://youtu.be/4PH5HwQVuOk
1990 Walgreens Commercial with the satellite: https://youtu.be/T6zt7c3jfRM
Wow, that's interesting! It's hard for me to imagine a time before pharmacies were always connected like that (and how difficult it would have once been to connect them). That system would presumably predate the late-90s Rite Aid takeover of Payless, meaning that it would have been Payless or even Pay 'N Save that had a system like that.
DeleteYes, back in those days retail clerks/pharmacists had to make a lot of phone calls and faxes to get their hands on the information they were looking for. I remember that when shopping at places like Sears and Montgomery Ward back in the day, if the location you went to didn't have the product you were looking for, they would call neighboring locations to see if they had it in stock. If they did, they would arrange to have the item held for the customer. These days, with computerized inventory that customers can see from home, those phone calls are a thing of the past.
DeleteBut, yet, even with those technological challenges, pharmacies back in the day seemed more capable of filling prescriptions accurately and on-time than modern pharmacies like Walgreens and CVS at least. I can't really speak about Rite AId. Obviously, those Sears and Montgomery Ward clerks who would make calls offered better customer service than what we're used to these days at department stores and discount stores.
I'm sure those satellite dishes were extremely expensive for the pharmacies to buy and operate. A modern Internet-based system is probably considerably cheaper. Even those computers that the pharmacists would have used would have been ~$2,500 each and that would have been in late 1980s valuations of the US dollar. And, of course, I'm sure the employees needed a lot of training back then because PCs were mostly text-based back then and most people had never used computers then. Those were the days!