Picture the last time you went there. Maybe you had a headache. Maybe your stomach hurt. You wanted to get some antibiotics (medicine that fights certain types of sickness), or maybe you didn’t even go there for medicine. Maybe you went to get toothpaste or, hell, a condom! (Always use condoms, by the way.) But have you guys ever actually thought about where the pharmacy gets all this stuff?
Because think about what a pharmacy actually is. Usually, somebody studies pharmacy for years, learns about medicine, gets the right permission to open a pharmacy, opens a little store, and starts serving people. That’s basically it. They’re never in the back like Walter White, mixing chemicals in some secret lab until a box of antibiotics comes out! And they’re definitely not making condoms in some secret room no one knows blowing each one up like a balloon to check for holes. Call it “Quality control” 😉
All the things you see in there, the antibiotics, the painkillers, the toothpaste, all of it, the pharmacy usually buys from somewhere else. And one of the main places they buy from is a company called a wholesaler. And a wholesaler is essentially, a company that has a huge warehouse full of medicine, the wholesaler buys a massive amount of this stuff, keeps it inside the warehouse, and then sells smaller amounts of it to pharmacies.
So instead of the pharmacy owner waking up and saying, “OK, today I need twenty boxes of this medicine, ten boxes of that one, five of this one, where the hell do I buy all of these?” they normally have a wholesaler they already work with. They tell the wholesaler what they need, the wholesaler puts everything together, loads it into a truck, and sends it to the pharmacy.
And they do this frequently because, obviously, pharmacies have to keep buying this stuff over and over again. People need medicine every single day, so the pharmacy keeps ordering.
And the easiest way for you to understand it is just answer this:
Have you ever walked into a pharmacy, asked for something, and they tell you, “Sorry, we don’t have it right now. It’s on backorder”? And backorder just means: you want it, but we can’t give it to you right now. Maybe their wholesaler ran out. Maybe that wholesaler can’t get enough of it. Maybe the medicine itself is in short supply. Sometimes a medicine is even being discontinued (the company making it is slowly stopping production).
And normally, when they tell you this, you don’t think much about it. You just say, “Okay,” leave, and go to the next pharmacy.
Pretend you went back home and tried to understand what’s actually happening? because this is what I did, I went to a pharmacy to get gummy melatonin, and they told me, “Well, we don’t have it.” Normally I would’ve just walked out and forgotten about it. But this time I went back home and started looking into what was actually happening.
And I realized something really interesting: when a pharmacy tells you “we don’t have it,” that does not necessarily mean nobody has it. Sometimes it literally just means their wholesaler doesn’t have it. Another wholesaler could have the exact thing inside a warehouse somewhere else. The pharmacy doesn’t know that wholesaler has it. The wholesaler doesn’t know this pharmacy is looking for it. And that little missing connection right there is where you guys are going to get customers.
Think about what you guys just learned. The pharmacy needs medicine. The wholesaler needs pharmacies buying medicine from them (that’s literally what their business & how they make money), and sometimes the pharmacy asks its normal wholesaler for something and the answer is, “We don’t have it.” Meanwhile, another wholesaler might have that exact medicine sitting in their warehouse.
The pharmacy can be our customer because we can sell them wholesalers that can give them medicine their normal wholesaler doesn’t have.
And the wholesaler can also be our customer because we can sell them pharmacies that need another place to buy medicine from.