No one who's worked at the big red machine has anything good to say about it.

My mother was a computer programer for CVS for a time. They had a program you could apply for that would pay for all higher education you persue while working for them. So basically she ripped off a free masters degree from CVS, and left immediately after she graduated.

SO...there is that.

And here I was jokingly about to say "well maybe you should have thought of that before going to McDonalds."

I still find it hard to believe people actually do think that way.

A lot of comments are repeating the myth I frequently heard during the healthcare debate. So many conservatives told me that we already have free universal healthcare in the form of ERs. Its not free, its actually incredibly expensive. And while they do treat emergency conditions first and charge after, they don't treat all medical conditions or provide medicine. They'll write you a prescription, but usually sent you to a pharmacist for you to pay and pick it up.

And for all those comments defending how pharmacists can't give away medicine in violation of store policy, has it occurred to them he could just lend her a dollar?

If she didn't didn't WANT a debilitating lung disease, she wouldn't have CHOSEN to live in North America.

Lending a dollar is also against store policy.

It's honestly a hard thing. I used to work in a bakery, and every once in a while we'd have a slow day on a day we were expecting tons of business (usually we got hit hard by the church crowd on sunday, but on occasion they'd have their own brunch we didn't know about, and we'd get very few customers). Days like that, we'd throw away dozens of bagels and doughnuts. I asked once why we don't donate it to a shelter or something. They explained to me that if someone choked on a day old bagel, or had a peanut allergy and ate one of the fried doughnuts, etc, we'd end up in deep shit. Way deeper for giving it away than if we had sold it, and the legal risks weren't worth trying to donate it.

If the laws for fucking DOUGHNUTS are that bad, I can only imagine what they must be like for pharmaceuticals. Chances are the guy behind the counter wasn't completely heartless, and really was worried about losing his job over that.

That said, it's really sad that's where we are right now, people are afraid to offer small courtesies at the risk of losing their job.

It's not a hard thing in this situation. You'll notice the pharmacist would have still been selling a product, rather than giving it away. I'm pretty sure that no additional legal liability is exposed when you lend a customer a dollar.

The problem wasn't legal liability. The problem was that that pharmacist (and possibly the corporation that employs him) is an asshole.

RocketBlender:
Whoever told you that at your bakery was either lying or mistaken. Public Law 104-210 protects food donators from legal liability. And there are tons of government and private charity groups that pick up and redistribute surplus food.

If she was trying to get medicine without a prescription, I'd understand. But the news reports on the story indicate that the only impediment to handing it over was being short a dollar. I can't imagine a situation in which giving her a dollar would get the guy fired or the store sued.

Huh, I'll admit, I never really looked into that law any further than my boss's answer. That bakery was an early job, I was a kid and didn't really question shit. As fir the pharmacist, you've got a point. If I had a woman suffocating in front of me, I'd go ahead and give them a dollar out of my own pocket.

I used to work at Toys R Us, and one of my worst duties was chucking the no longer useful toy displays into the crusher, so that nobody could accidentally play with them.

I then went to work at Michael's Crafts, and they made me snip apart the unsold paint tubes, so that "art students wouldn't scrounge".

I understand that neither toys nor paints are mandatory for human survival, but both instances were just examples of dick moves.

There's a reason they were recently bought out by CareNow. Hell, it was only a couple weeks ago that all the stores changed to being open 24 hours.