Therefore, for the ten-year history ...

So for a ten-year history of our pharmacy, we had to develop a system that, firstly, would enable the fullest to meet the needs of the people in pharmaceuticals and medical items, and secondly, would promote the formation and increase the number of regular customers, and finally , would leave room to maneuver and to develop new directions of our activities. According to our interlocutors, we can not say that such a system proceeded smoothly. Since the discovery (and this was in October 1992) here have tried almost all known methods of attracting customers and optimization of the institution itself. Opened new departments have experimented with the space trading floor and window dressing, trying to make a more flexible pricing policy - in general, give full play to its market fantasies. Fortunately, that after privatization, relative freedom in this regard, no limit. Yet in the end we concluded that the most acceptable to the population and, therefore, advantageous for us to shape the work pharmacy is to maintain its traditional character - says Inna. - Special groups of goods to be sold in specialized departments or stores, the pharmacy must sell drugs. Our main problem, as for most other agencies that level - lack of physical space. So we had to abandon those areas that the yield of, say, comparable with the department of preprinted forms, and on labor costs and require areas surpass it. For example, some time we had department of optics, but it becomes really profitable only if the entire process of making glasses in one place. Allocate the same special room for these needs, we could not. As far as pricing mechanisms to attract customers, then, after passing a certain stage of "dumping," we came to the conclusion that it is absolutely dead-end road. Firstly, it was found that the factor is not the lowest price is crucial for increasing popularity of pharmacies in the population. In addition, the desire to make at lower prices than competitors, not just leads to a reduction in profitability and turnover of pharmacies, but inevitably pushes her to purchase drugs in the so-called "gray" distributors. We initially put at the forefront of its work to guarantee high quality of all submitted our product (which is about 4000 names), so I started working with major suppliers - "AAI", "Protek" and others. In the retail products were obtained, of course, more expensive, but there were no complaints from buyers or inspection bodies have never been ... Thus, according to our interviewee, over time it became necessary to compensate for well-grounded prices an additional set of services that customers could only get in the Novo-Peredelkino. And here came in handy more experience of Soviet times, when almost every pharmacy, the pharmacist worked informant.