Recently I went to a pharmacy in another town to get the first batch of medicines for my 90-year-old mother under the Pharmacy of Your Choice scheme.
Inside there was already one elderly man waiting for his free medicines: a non-paying customer like me.
The two salespersons (a man and a woman) were serving five "ordinary" paying customers. Soon after I entered, the elderly man and I were told to sit and wait. While waiting, the man told me that he had had to come three times to the pharmacy that morning and he still had not got his medicines. In the meantime paying customer no. 6 walked in, followed within a few minutes by nos. 7, 8 and 9. When after almost half an hour the last of the first five customers was gone, the salesman/pharmacist turned to serve customer no. 6, completely ignoring us. It became painfully obvious that the intention was to serve the paying customers first, which meant that if more customers came in, we would be stuck in there until closing time.
So I stood up and went over to the counter and addressing both pharmacists/salespersons, I pointed out that the elderly gentleman and I had been there long before the four paying customers, and that it was surely our turn on the basis of "first come, first served".
The angry, aggressive reply I got went something on these lines: (the woman) "I start working here at 7 in the morning" ... (the man) "This scheme was forced upon us".... (Both) "We decide who gets served when ... We do not want to serve difficult people like you ... You can go and get your medicines from the clinic!" To which I angrily replied that it did not interest me in the least to know at what time she started work, that it was not true that the scheme had been forced on them, and that since they obviously had no intention of dealing fairly with the "free medicine" customers, I would certainly go elsewhere and never again set foot in that pharmacy.
May I suggest to the Ministry of Health that it should make it clear to pharmacies that the Pharmacy of Your Choice scheme is voluntary and there is, as far as I know, no basis for anyone to maintain that it was forced on pharmacists. If they cannot cope, they should withdraw from the scheme. But they have absolutely no right to discriminate between customers in the mean way they do.