Rite-Aid Admits Half Its Stores Have Zero Employees

A spokesman for Rite-Aid, Inc., which operates 1036 large-scale pharmacies across the United States, today admitted to a hastily assembled Bronx, New York news conference that half of its stores "are completely unmanned."

Jerry Ringer, Vice President for Consumer Relations, said that the company was finally admitting to its "Zero Employee Policy" after bloggers had encouraged customers to shoplift "everything they could physically carry out of the store."

"We formerly just had a few employees in each store, mostly for restocking shelves and one for working the cash register," Ringer told reporters. "This is aside from the pharmacy, which is always occupied by actual human beings.

"We found that no matter how few employees there were," Ringer said, "no matter how bad service became, our customers never left us. I guess they had no alternatives, since we had already wiped out all of the family-run traditional pharmacies in the United States."

Rite-Aid had gone to a "Self-Serve Checkout" concept, Ringer said, which "masked the fact that we simply had no employees anywhere in the building, except to restock shelves between midnight and two a.m. We were counting on the essential honesty of the American people."

When awareness of the Zero Zemployee Policy reached the blogosphere, Ringer said, the company had to act.

"It's true that our stores are understaffed to the point of not being staffed at all," Ringer told reporters. "But look. If you wander the aisles long enough, you'll eventually find whatever you need, plus some other stuff you forgot you needed. And as long as you used the Self-Serve Checkout, you got what you wanted and we didn't need to pay salaries to people.

"It was a win-win."

Ringer said that Rite-Aid was now accepting applications from individuals who "are willing to work an hour or so a day, just to make sure nobody who goes on the Internet and reads about what we're really doing is in our stores and stealing us blind."