Current promotion for free gift card (or something) with NEW Prescription?

[JoyfulMama]

I know that Walgreen's currently has an offer for a free $25 gift card with a TRANSFERRED prescription, but they won't honor the offer with a NEW prescription.

(I think this is ridiculous, as they are telling me they only want my business if it is stealing it from a competitor.)

 

Anyone know of a current offer out there? :bigear:

[Tap]

I can explain a bit of this. Yes the point is to draw business away from the competitor.

 

BUT there is another huge factor in this....CII prescriptions. These are the high level pain meds, some ADD/ADHD, and other meds that require extra paperwork to fill them. These prescriptions take much longer to fill and require a paper prescription each time they are filled. This essentially makes them handled as a 'new' prescription each time it is filled, even though it is technically just a refill of the previous prescription.

 

We have had pts who have multiple kids, all who have ADD/ADHD meds. They would drop off prescriptions, pay $5 copays for them and walk out with $75-100 each month in gift cards. EACH MONTH. They were making $900-1200 a year on these gift cards (not incl. paying $240 in copays). There were some people that we actually suspected were not using the meds, just getting them filled to make the money on them. As a pharmacy, we were only making a few dollars per prescription (ins and drug cos make the $$ in pharmacy) and then taking 15 minutes of labor just to end up paying them to come to our store.

 

When a person has a hand written prescription, they can take it to any pharmacy they want (ins restrictions not withstanding). Giving discounts on these scripts don't help stores build a customer base like the refills do. A refill you come back for every month...a one time antibiotic...you don't.

[JoyfulMama]

THANK YOU Tap, Tap, Tap, for your explaination.

 

After thinking about it I realized that the draw is really for maintenance meds. And I realized that one-time fill Rxs could take advantage of this offer - one time abx and such. Didn't think about more restricted meds. I think there had to be a way to restrict the abuse of the offer, and since they may not be able to restrict a drug class for the coupon (since most aren't familiar with drug classes), this was the best way for them to do it.