Is your Boots a chaotic mess?

[Nutmuncher]

Has anyone else’s Boots store become messy and chaotic recently ? Granted my usual one is a large city store but still, it’s a huge space and has tonnes of products but there’s no actual logic to the layout anymore. It’s like someone decided to just make them almost as bad as Superdrug.

I’m not the only one am I?

My local one never has a hair out of place.

Lucky you- mines like a Saturday afternoon every day 😭

Not recently, our local one has been a riot for years

They ripped out the pharmacy too a couple of years ago so just a big empty space where that was

a Superdrug is coming to the retail park so hoping it is either better or makes Boots up its game

Yes. It's not that it's untidy or unclean, but more that it's impossible to find anything. Everything has 2 or 3 locations, it's so disorganised, often you have to traipse up and downstairs to find the full range of any one product.
I've fully converted to Superdrug.

There's 2 branches locally.
The smaller one (local high street) looks like it needs redecorating. The floors are uneven and taped with gaffer tape. The stock is all at the front of the shelves but only a couple of items in each row.
The bigger one (in a retail park) is in better decorative order. Again the stock is really low.
I also use a Boots opticians. It's OK but choice of spectacle frames is limited and the price of eye drops is often different to the pharmacy branch across the road.
DSIS used to work for them. She says they have trouble retaining qualified pharmacists and rely a lot on locum staff.
I predict they going to be gone in the next couple of years.

I have three near me, all very different. One is in a shopping centre, of manageable size and always clean and organised. One is on the old shopping parade and looks like time stopped in there somewhere in the 1970s. It's grubby with a cracking floor, and shelves usually half empty. Then the third one is massive, in a retail park. It's a big desolate jumbled mess of way too many lines and I hate going in there.

Our Superdrug is a lot more pleasant to shop in but I like a lot of Boots own brand products so I have to brave it. It’s definitely more tired looking and not as well set out as Superdrug.

I only ever use the tiny local one to collect prescriptions. I have a high street one and a retail park locally as well as the tiny one but can’t remember when I was last in either or bought anything in one of them.

It's going down hill and the staff are disinterested. Speaks volumes and it's a shame. I'd never use the pharmacy due to the queues.

The main Boots in Leicester city centre is really old, shabby & tired. It’s long overdue refurbishment but I assume they are going to let it continue to run down then close it, exactly as M&S did in the building next door.

The two I use are fine. It can be hard to find some things but IME that’s because of the large range of products and it’s not always obvious how you’d classify some particular OTC product. But I’ve always found there are enough staff around to point me in the right direction.

No, the medium-sized one in my town is fine.

What really annoys me about our big city centre one is that your basic Boots stuff - sanitary products, paracetamol, baby products etc- are upstairs and very hard to find. The ground floor is dedicated to luxury makeup and hair brands.

So they’re making parents with buggies - and ill people, women with periods- go upstairs to hunt down what should be obvious and accessible. Makes me mad!

Desperately needs a refurb and the shelves are often empty because they get hit by shoplifters who take £1000's at a time. Management never report the thefts to the police. I'm surprised it's still open. The pharmacy must be making a killing to fund all the missing stock.

Ours is a shit tip but it's also utterly tiny. It's been getting worse since covid, staff turnovers brutal.

This is my gripe too. No logic and disjointed placement of products. I’d love to know the rationale behind their merchandising scheme 😅

My local one is horrible, London zone 2, stock levels are terrible and it just carries essentials, no premium beauty etc, very shabby looking with scuffed paintwork and wonky floor tiles. I only use it for click and collect. It's been like that since I moved here 3 years ago, not a recent thing.

The Boots in my previous area was lovely, it was in central London and catered for high earning professionals so had lots of premium beauty and skincare, and was always nicely clean and well-staffed.

I'm in a coastal town. The boots is fairly large, but I can never find anything either. One time I went and the alarms were going off and staff were all wearing foam ear plugs and working as 'normal'. Apparently it had been going off for 2 days!!!

I go almost monthly to collect medications for my husband and have ever seen the same pharmacist twice! His medication was apparently re formulated so rather than 14mg its now called 8mg but the same potency. Instead of calling DH to advise he needs to contact his GP to amend the script, they left a note when I collected his other meds. DH was then left without diabetic meds, so I went around the loop of calling the boots branch who said to call the boots support line, who then sent me to head office who said ' we don't have medically trained staff'. I then called his GP who said to call his boots pharmacy and ask them! I then got back to calling boots helpline who said they could only help if he was out of medication and I said yes, yes he is NOW out of medication, and they suggested I call his GP! 😡

Mine shut down because of shoplifters. 😥

The two that are closest to me are small but seem well organised (actually one of them used to but haven’t visited in years, the other I went into for the first time in a couple of years yesterday and seemed tidy enough) but the one near my work is massive - great variety and good selection of ranges but my god I can’t find anything anywhere!

Ours is the same... wonder if we live in the same city. It's infuriating. For a while when my now 3yo was a baby the lift kept breaking too, and they'd have to take crowds of parents out the back to use the stock lift!

Yes - the make up stands are poorly stocked and always look grubby. No one seems to clean the tester stands for the perfume and these always seem a bit dirty as well.
Both branches near me close for lunch, which is bonkers when that's the time that workers on their lunch break would like to pop in. I don't know why the pharmacist cannot go for lunch at a time which is not between 1 - 2 pm or why the shop cannot stay open even if the pharmacist is not working and therefore prescriptions can't be dispensed.
Boots used to be amazing - it was one of the shops I really missed when I lived in another country, but they've literally handed all their business to their competitors.