Staff at Jhoots pharmacies have been unable to “pay for the groceries” and have had to “hitch rides” to work after the pharmacy chain failed to pay their January wages, they told C+D this week (January 21).
“We last got paid on December 15 – normally it’s the 15th of every month, so we should have been paid on the 15th for this month,” one anonymous Jhoots dispenser said.
But a week on from pay-day, they told C+D that they knew of “four stores minimum” in their area that hadn’t received any payment since before Christmas.
Following pressure from C+D, Jhoots today (January 23) said that there was a technical issue while processing this month’s payments that led to a portion of staff not being paid, but that all staff have now received payment. Read its full response below.
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However, C+D understands that this may not be the case and cannot confirm that all staff had been paid as of this morning.
Parent to two children, the dispenser said that “because [they had] not been paid [they couldn’t] afford school lunches”.
“We’ve literally emptied what minimal savings pot we had and the money is gone now,” they added.
“A colleague that I work with…she’s really struggling now to give proper meals to her daughter and having to borrow money off friends and family,” they said.
Read more: Jhoots Pharmacy disposing of ‘existing branches’ amid £350k annual loss
In an email seen by C+D, Jhoots had said that payments should be released by the end of the week.
But the dispenser said that Jhoots staff are “really, really angry, because they’re just not giving any explanation”.
“There’s just no compassion in their emails at all” – “we feel like we’re just volunteering at work at the moment…[are we] even guaranteed to get next month’s pay?” they said.
“Nothing to our name”
The dispenser told C+D that Jhoots had given them January pay slips and recorded payments with HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), despite not actually paying staff.
They added that despite usually being eligible for universal credit, “because [Jhoots] put the earnings through, it means that we don’t get any support this month, so we’ll literally have nothing to our name at all this month”.
Another pharmacy staff member at a Jhoots branch in Hull told C+D that they were in the same situation.
Read more: Lloydspharmacy: Jhoots rent row leaves town without pharmacy ‘indefinitely’
“I can’t get any universal credit, so I’ve now got no wages and no universal credit…it’s just unacceptable,” they said, adding that they’re “having to hitch rides [to work] off random people”.
“We have to work for free because we can’t risk losing our jobs - we must uphold our half of the contract but they aren’t giving us any information about being paid,” they added.
Read more: Lloydspharmacy liquidation: Jhoots branch third premises to be ‘repossessed’
“It’s affecting everyone’s mental health, anxiety is through the roof because each day you’re waking up and thinking, is it in the bank?” they said.
Another Jhoots employee told C+D that colleagues are “being threatened with eviction because we can’t pay the rent”.
“It is really getting us down to the fact where it’s making us ill,” they added.
“Disciplinary action”
The third anonymous Jhoots employee told C+D that they had been threatened with “disciplinary action” after they made social media posts about the issue.
“I was instructed immediately to take it down, otherwise I would be disciplined,” they added.
Read more: Jhoots Pharmacy branch receives second bailiff visit in six months
And a fourth Jhoots employee in the area told C+D that management blocked employees from sharing their experience on the local branch Whatsapp group.
“They basically said ‘you can’t talk about that in this chat, this is not what the chat’s for’. We said we’ve got no other way to speak to people and to ask our queries,” they said.
“We’re trying to do what we can, we’re trying to talk to the people, but they’re not listening,” they added.
“I really don’t want to leave”
The anonymous dispenser told C+D that they had already handed in their notice at Jhoots and know of two more colleagues who planned to do the same.
“I’m just going to do some locum dispensing shifts in my area, get some guaranteed money,” they said.
“I’ve been applying for jobs, it’s just there’s not a lot on the market at the moment,” another employee said.
“We’ve all worked here quite a while and we’ve really enjoyed the job…I really don’t want to leave, but they’re forcing us,” another added.
Read more: Jhoots adds 36 ex-Lloydspharmacy branches to its estate
And another stressed that their pharmacy was “running as normal because we don’t want the people in the village to suffer”.
“There’s a lot of old people in this village…they depend on us [and] just because Jhoots has let us down doesn’t mean to say we’re going to let them down,” they said.
“We will come to work as normal, but not for Jhoots, we’re doing it for the people in the village,” they said.
A technical issue
A Jhoots spokesperson today told C+D that there was a technical issue while processing payments that led to a portion of its staff not being paid on the expected pay date of January 15.
The company claimed that this affected a small portion of its staff.
Read more: ‘I won’t work for Boots again’: Chain cancels locum two hours before shift
Its HR department has been sending e-mail communications to all branches, not just those affected by payment issues, updating them on the issues and reassuring them that it is working to resolve them, it said.
It told C+D that the delays in employed staff payments have been resolved and all staff have been paid.
Jhoots latest
This month, the chain’s annual report for the year ending December 31 2023 reported a mammoth post-tax loss of £5m for the year, after making a profit of £1.6m the previous year.
In September, the pharmacy’s sister company Jhoots Healthcare Limited revealed that it had suffered a loss of £355,799 in 2023 but that directors were “confident of [its] future prospects” and had paid their other businesses thousands of pounds in “management fees”.
Meanwhile in July, C+D exclusively revealed that a Jhoots branch was the fourth premise to be repossessed by bailiffs in connection with Lloydspharmacy’s liquidation.
Read more: Lloydspharmacy confirms ‘successful sale’ of all community pharmacies
At the time, a Devon landlord told C+D that “when Lloydspharmacy was liquidated”, Jhoots “somehow managed” to go into the premises with “no lease assignment” and did not pay “a penny” of rent.
Jhoots said that it “[disputed] the facts recalled by the landlord” and stressed “that many genuine attempts were made by [the chain] to reach an amenable deal with the landlord”.
In April, bailiffs repossessed another Jhoots branch previously operated by Lloyspharmacy in Rainham, Kent – and the branch received a second bailiff visit just six months later.
Jhoots Pharmacy announced that it had bought 36 former Lloydspharmacy branches using a £17.4 million loan from HSBC in November 2023.
