CVS Pharmacy just managed to lose any chance of my future business without me ever actually walking through their doors.
Our second child just arrived (I’ll post on that in a bit!), and it looks like he is going to have some issues with acid reflux, just like his big brother did — but starting earlier. Not wanting to start a child who was only born about 68 hours ago on Zantac yet (especially since he hasn’t even met his primary care doc yet, which would probably make it difficult to get the medicine prescribed), I figured I’d look around for a symptom reliever that would be safe for him to use. After doing a fair bit of research, it looked like Colic Calm was probably the right choice; unfortunately, our regular pharmacy (Walgreens) doesn’t carry it; it’s only available at CVS. I’ve never been to a CVS store in my life, but figured that it was worth it to get the “right stuff.” I pulled up the CVS web site to look up the store hours, and saw that the closest store closes at 10pm – doh! I then looked up 24-hour locations, and the closest store is 24 miles away.. sigh. I then looked back at the hours for closer locations, and saw that there were two locations nearby that were open until midnight — hurrah!
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So I hopped in the car, and headed out to the Eden Prairie location. I got there, and the store was still lit up, but when I walked up to the door it refused to open. I figured out where the store hours were posted, and saw 10pm — sigh!! Hopped back in the car, and pulled out my phone to figure out if I was going to drive to Plymouth (the 24-hour location), or if I could go to Apple Valley (another midnight location.) It looked like Apple Valley would get me home faster, so I figured I’d call the store just to make absolutely sure it was open until midnight. I called, pressed the button for hours, and was happy to hear that it was open until 12:00. Hopped in the car, arrived, and the store was completely dark — what?! Apparently both the CVS website and the store phone number have incorrect hours. Nice. At this point, I just needed to get back home, so I swung into the Walgreens that is about a mile from our house on the way home, and picked up a bottle of Wellements Gripe Water, which should get us through until Amazon’s delivery of Colic Calm arrives on Thursday.
Considering that inaccurate information from CVS’s site and phone number cost my child and wife an hour of frustration (again, the Walgreens is about 3 minutes away from our house — instead of a trip that took a total of about 75 minutes, I could have been gone for under 15), I am not going to shop at CVS anytime in the near future.. just wouldn’t make sense. If their site had just had correct hours to start with, I would have either gone ahead and driven up to the 24-hour Plymouth location, or decided to go the Walgreens route.. but in either case, I wouldn’t have had any resentment towards CVS. Since they just wasted an hour of time that I consider to be truly precious (both because of my very young child’s frustration, and the inability to sleep for that hour), however, I won’t be shopping at CVS, well, ever.
I guess the short story is to get the info on your website right, or else you will lose customers, without even knowing it.