HeIsNear.com 🎙️

Walked into a major 24-hour drugstore at 8:30 PM on a Tuesday because my 10-month-old had a sudden 102° fever and we ran out of infant Tylenol. I went straight to the medicine aisle. The entire wall every bottle of fever reducer, children's electrolyte solution, and basic thermometer was locked behind heavy sliding plexiglass. I pressed the red "Customer Assistance" button on the shelf. A robotic voice boomed over the store PA: "Assistance needed in aisle 4." I stood there holding a crying, feverish toddler for eighteen minutes. Pressed it three more times. I finally walked up to the front counter. There was exactly ONE employee in the entire 12,000-square-foot store, frantically running between a line of eight angry shoppers at the register and packing online delivery orders. She looked at me near tears and said, "I don't have the key. Only the night supervisor has it, and he’s in the locked back office unloading the freight truck until 9 PM." Retail giants fired 60% of their floor staff to juice quarterly operating margins, blamed "shrink" to justify locking basic infant medicine behind bulletproof glass, and created a retail experience where getting fever medication for a sick baby feels like begging a warden for yard privileges. If your business model requires locking $6 bottles of children's medicine in cages with zero humans available to unlock them, you aren't running a pharmacy you're running an obstacle course that punishes parents in emergencies.