Five minutes of your pharmacist costs £2.70

Last week I asked you to count the customer who arrives with no prescription. Just a problem and a question.

If you ran the tally, you now know roughly how many you get.

The next question is the one owners actually struggle with: can you afford to serve them properly?

Most owners assume not. "We'd love to do more of that, but we haven't got the staff."

So let's price it.

A community pharmacist's time in 2026 costs somewhere around £32 an hour, going by typical locum rates. Call it 53p a minute.

Five minutes of that time costs about £2.70. Ten minutes costs about £5.30.

That's the real cost of the conversation everyone calls "free advice".

Three things, and they stack.

A fee, sometimes. In England, an eligible Pharmacy First consultation pays £17. Not every conversation qualifies, and it has to be recorded properly. But some of the ones you're already having for nothing are worth £17 each.

A sale, often. Whatever they buy sits on the list you built two weeks ago, where you know the profit in pounds, not percent.

The next ten years, sometimes. The customer who gets five honest minutes, including "that one isn't for you, see your GP this week", comes back for everything. Nothing on your till measures that, which is exactly why it gets under-protected.

So the arithmetic is not the problem. £2.70 against £17 plus a sale plus loyalty is not a difficult decision.

Because nobody has decided in advance who handles the question, and when the pharmacist gets pulled in.

So it gets decided every time, by whoever is standing at the counter, under pressure, with four people waiting.

And under pressure, people do the fastest thing. They point at a shelf. They say "this one's popular." They give the customer what they asked for and move on.

The pharmacist never hears about it. The owner never hears about it. The sale that didn't happen, and the advice that wasn't given, leave no trace.

That's not a staffing problem. It's a missing decision.

Take your three most common questions. Not every scenario in the shop, just three. Most pharmacies could name them in ten seconds: something for a cough, something for a child's temperature, something for heartburn.

For each one, write down three things:

1. The questions the team asks first. Who it's for, how long it's been going on, what they've already tried, what else they take.

2. When the pharmacist comes out. Name the triggers in plain words, so nobody has to judge it on the spot.

3. The options that are genuinely suitable and, next to each, the profit in pounds from your own list.

One page, three questions. That's the whole thing.

Then the answer no longer depends on who happens to be at the counter when the shop is busy.

The ranking by pounds is not a ranking of what to recommend.

What's suitable for the customer is decided first, by the person qualified to decide it. The pounds column exists so that when two or three products are all genuinely right, you know what the choice is worth to the business, and your team can offer an honest choice instead of reaching for whatever is nearest.

Any team that gets that backwards will cost you far more than £2.70 at a time.

Write the one-page rule for your three most common questions.

Do it with whoever is actually at the counter, not alone in the back. They know the questions better than you do, and a rule they helped write is a rule they use.

Just the three questions. Not a staff manual. Not a training day.

And if you did last week's tally, put the two side by side: the number of advice customers you get, and whether anyone has ever been told what to do when one arrives.

Hit reply and send me the three questions you hear most. I'm collecting them from everyone reading this, and I'll publish the top ten in a few weeks so you can see whether your shop matches everyone else's. I read every reply.

Next week: the part that comes before any of this. Nearly a third of people who don't use a pharmacy say the same thing — they didn't know a pharmacy could help. That's a marketing problem, and it's cheaper to fix than you'd think.

Pollyanna