Meet the Collierville Walmart Pharmacy team. It's the longest-tenured team in the company.
Customers going to the Collierville Walmart Pharmacy have probably gotten used to seeing some familiar faces handling their prescriptions over the years.
With nearly 4,600 Walmart pharmacies across the country, the Collierville location is touted as having the longest-tenured staff in the entire company. The pharmacists at the Collierville pharmacy have almost 166 years of combined experience at Walmart.
The Collierville Walmart Pharmacy staff includes:
Part-time staff pharmacist Kim Lewis will hit 31 years in May.
Part-time staff pharmacist Stacy Freeman is at 26 years.
Staff pharmacist Alexia Dawson will mark 28 years in May.
Part-time staff pharmacist Sandy Morris will hit 21 years in May.
Pharmacy clinical services manager Jacquelynn Hardin has 15 years at Walmart.
Flexor pharmacist Jennifer Kennon will be at 11 years in June.
The person overseeing the group is Pharmacy Manager Rick Powers. He hit the 34-year mark at the Collierville Walmart Pharmacy on Feb. 5.
Powers, 61, was astonished to learn the length of time he and the staff have worked at Walmart.
“I do have an amazing staff and people who love what they do,” Powers said. “Each one of us lives in the area, so we have a connection to lots of different people in that area. I think that has helped us as far as we each bring something different to the pharmacy as far as our experiences. It’s kind of like a team that wins an athletic event. When you all work together and have a common goal, it makes for a winning group. For us, it’s been a winning combination.”
'We all have mutual respect for each other'
Even though Powers wasn’t the person who did the hiring of the current staff, he is grateful for how well they’ve gotten along.
“There is a lot of turnover, not just in pharmacy, but in all kinds of different jobs,” Powers said. “People are always looking for something that is better or a working situation that is better. As far as my part, I can honestly say that I’ve enjoyed working with each of them. For one thing, we don’t bicker and fight amongst each other and that means a great deal.”
Like Powers, Lewis, 54, has worked for Walmart pharmacy for more than 30 years. However, Lewis’ time at the world’s largest retailer hasn’t all been at the Collierville location. Lewis started at Walmart in 1991 as a pharmacy student. After graduating from pharmacy school in 1993 at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, she began as a staff pharmacist at the former Walmart pharmacy on American Way. She later moved up the ladder, becoming a district manager in both Alabama and Tupelo, Mississippi. She currently works a couple days a week at the Collierville Walmart Pharmacy. She attributes how well the staff works together to Powers' leadership.
“He is a good manager and got great people skills," Lewis said. "Being a district manager, I’ve seen a lot of different management skills and how that works. I believe we all have mutual respect for each other.”
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The evolution of the pharmacy from typewriters to COVID vaccines
Powers started working at the Collierville Walmart Pharmacy in February 1990 and is the only pharmacy manager the location has ever had.
The Somerville native graduated in 1985 from the College of Pharmacy at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis. He went on to work for the now defunct Fred’s as a pharmacist in Collierville before going to work at the Collierville Walmart Pharmacy.
He remembered a time when the retail stores he worked for would use a typewriter to create labels for prescriptions and kept paper records. Powers said pharmacies would later go to computer-generated profiles and computer programs to check for drug interactions.
In addition, Powers said not too many insurance claims were filed when he started in pharmacy. He estimated the number of claims that through insurance is now more than 90%.
Powers has seen the revolution of the pharmacy industry over the years. He said technology has been enormous help for pharmacists. It has freed them to do such things as administer immunizations, test and treat customers for strep throat, flu and COVID-19, and educate patients on things such as managing diabetes.
“Technology has been extremely beneficial and the changes I’ve seen since I graduated from (pharmacy) school have been enormous,” Powers said. "The different things that we can do just the testing itself, like the blood glucose testing, cholesterol screening were some of those different things that weren’t available back when I first graduated from school.”
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Hardin started at Walmart in 2008 and moved to the Collierville Walmart Pharmacy in 2021. She said one of the main advancements she has experienced as a local pharmacist is how much a pharmacist’s role has expanded over the years. When she began at Walmart, Hardin said pharmacists weren’t giving immunizations in the pharmacy even though they were trained for it in pharmacy school. The impact of the coronavirus showed the significance of pharmacists being able to do vaccines.
“I honestly thought this would probably never happen in my lifetime,” Hardin said. "When I started, we would check for drug interactions, we counseled patients and we were the dispensing pharmacists. We’re slowly becoming more than dispensing pharmacists.
"We’ve added doing immunizations and that was a huge thing as pharmacists to take that on because what would have happened if all these pharmacists were not able to immunize during COVID? So, of course, immunization is probably the biggest breakthrough I had in my career.”
Corey Davis is the Collierville and Germantown reporter with The Commercial Appeal. He can be reached at Corey.Davis@commercialappeal.com or 901-293-1610.
This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Walmart Pharmacy team in Collierville, TN, longest-tenured in company
