It has become a little obvious that almost every pharmacy is overwhelmed, to put it nicely. Chain stores are criminally understaffed; and independents suffer such poor reimbursements that they are paying your insurance company for the privilege of serving you while slowly going out of business. Completing all the work piled up at the pharmacy has been impossible for about a decade but there was a time long ago when closing the store would involve finishing almost every prescription that had come in. Today that is physically impossible and pharmacies falling thousands of orders behind are putting both patient health and employee sanity at risk. To understand how we got here you must realize where the pharmacy is located, directly at the corner of where crap hits the fan.