Hyperfixed - ReTell All

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

In 2022, Amber’s favorite podcast came to an abrupt and shocking end, and now, its archive of episodes has started disappearing from the internet. So she’s come to the Hyperfixed team to find out how to preserve what’s left, and answer a question that's been haunting her for years: is her favorite podcast host ok?LINKS: ReTell Pharmacy PodcastWe are doing a LIVE SHOW in Brooklyn in September, get your tickets herehttp://tickets.hyperfixedpod.com/Please consider becoming a hyperfixed premium member. Your support keeps our show alive.https://www.hyperfixedpod.com/join Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

How We Made Your Mother is a rewatch podcast that looks back episode by episode at the hit TV show How I Met Your Mother. It's hosted by me, Josh Radner, along with series co-creator Craig Thomas. In seasons one and two, we were joined by Neil Patrick Harris, Kobe Smolders, Brian Cranston, Ashley Williams, Wayne Brady, Jenna Fisher and Angela Kinsey, Joe Manginello, and my brilliant co-creator Carter Bays, and now we are diving into season three. So whether it's your 50th, three watch or your first time through, follow How We Made Your Mother, wherever you get your podcasts. Next month, Hyperfixed will be live at Roulette Intermedium in downtown Brooklyn.

We've got stories, we've got interviews, and we have just confirmed that the Breakmaster Cylinder will be part of the performance. So now you can see definitively that we are, in fact, two different people. You can get tickets at Tickets.hyperfixpod.com. Get them now because they're limited. Tickets.com. Hyperfixed live, September 11th at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn. Tickets.hyperfixedpod.com. I'm Alex Goldman, and this is Hyperfixed.

Each week on our show, listeners write in with their problems big and small, and I solve them. Or at least I try. And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't. This week, retail all. I've done CPR on a guy who collapsed. I had a woman who fell on her face and her glasses broke into her eye socket, things like this, like intense emergencies. And I have had so many of them.

This is Amber. She isn't a paramedic or a firefighter or any other type of first responder you'd expect to find dealing with people who are actively bleeding out of their eye socket. Amber is a pharmacist, a retail pharmacist to be specific. And if there's one type of pharmacist you're likely to be familiar with, it's this one. Retail pharmacists are the people you see standing behind the counter at your local CVS or Walgreens. They answer your calls, they field your questions, and they dispense prescription medications. But despite being the most publicly visible type of pharmacist, the pressures they face are largely invisible to the public. Like I used to work for one of the big chains. And because they continue to negotiate their margins so infinitesimally small, they just continue to push more and more work onto the pharmacist's shoulders. All across the country, giant retail pharmacies have been cutting back on pharmaceutical staff, even as prescription volumes continue to rise. So in addition to fielding your calls and questions, filling your prescription medications,

and tending to you when you've been stabbed in the eye, retail pharmacists are increasingly being asked to take on the work of people who used to support that work. And on top of that, the pharmacies have also imposed these intensely demanding metrics for the performance of their pharmacists. So like, how quickly do you answer the phones, how many scripts do you fill an hour, how many shots have you given? Like, we're talking hundreds of metrics that you are being tracked on. at all times. And maybe these seem like the kind of increased pressures that are happening all across the workforce, maybe even at your job. But I bet at the very least, you're allowed to go to the bathroom without getting yelled at.

Here's Amber's husband, Andy. I remember when you were at that job, there was, I think, a Wall Street Journal article that came out. And I think the headline was something to the effect of, like, working in a pharmacy is very similar to working in a sweatshop. And I remember showing it to you, and you're like, that's maybe a bit dramatic. Then you read through, you're like, well, I mean, yeah, I can't go to the hospital. bathroom and yeah, I don't take much breaks or water breaks. It's like talking about, yeah, having 14-hour

shifts where you can't go to the bathroom and you can't take a break to eat or drink. And I was like, well, yeah, that's all true. But Andy's like, your job's bad. Your job's rough, it's bad. Luckily now most of the chains I've implemented a lunch break, but yeah, you'd regularly work a 16-hour shift, no lunch break, no bathroom break, no nothing. You couldn't breathe. You had to just be filling, filling, doing your job the whole time. And you only get paid for 12. Yeah, and you'd only get paid for a certain number of those hours.

The rest of the hours would be you staying before and after to try and catch up. Now, this is not the problem Amber wrote into us about. Thank God, right? But the reason we're talking about it is because it was in this context where Amber's getting stretched beyond her limit, she's dealing with nonstop corporate chaos, getting yelled at by angry customers that she's just trying to help, and starting to question just how long she can keep doing this job

that Amber finds this one podcast, that suddenly makes this whole crazy situation feel somehow more manageable. It was 2019. Amber had just finished an epically grueling shift, and she gets into her car and she types the word pharmacy into her podcast app. And the first result that comes up was a podcast called Retel Pharmacy. Not Retail Pharmacy, but Retel Pharmacy.

Amber has no idea what this is, but she hits play. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Retail Pharmacy. The podcast that gets into the crazy upside-down world of retail pharmacy itself. I am your host, Mitch Lee FarmD. Thank you guys for being with me on the first episode of the show. The voice that came over Amber Stereo belonged to a guy named Mitch Lee. He was a retail pharmacist, just like her.

And as Amber listened, it felt like Mitch was talking to her. You might think that the question you just got asked is beyond the most strangest thing that anyone's ever been asked in their life. But no, I swear to you, it happens to ever. everyone. And what really helps me anyway, and I think can help some other people, is to know that you are not alone. You are not alone. It was the whole thesis of the series, and it was exactly what Amber needed to hear. I was immediately hooked just with how relatable it was and how heard I felt everything he talked about. I'm like, yes, this is my life. This is my life. Listening to retail

pharmacy became a part of Amber's daily routine. Every day on her way, too, and from work, she'd queue up the podcast. New episodes, past episodes, she listened to everything. First thing is first, ladies and gentlemen, you made it through the first week of November. Congratulations. We are fresh off a Halloween episode that I had way too much fun on. It was a great time. If you hadn't listened to that... Amber loved how late and funny this show was. The silly sound effects and the old school radio DJ feel always managed to lift her spirits. If you hadn't listened to last week's episode, check it out and take a friend because it was scary. It was spooky. Do we still have this? Oh, yeah. The show was uplifting in other ways, too. Each week, Mitch would feature a different unsung hero of the pharmacy world.

This week's tech of the week is Amelia on Facebook. He'd usually do the technician of the week. And that was more of like recognizing that our technicians are our saviors. They're the best. And we love them. And they do incredible jobs. Month after month, Amber kept listening. Even when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and threw her industry into chaos, Mitch was still there, always staying positive, reminding Amber that she wasn't alone. It made a very, very tough job a little easier to tolerate. And that's like his whole message in the podcast is like, our job is really hard. But if we like stick together and we talk about it and we laugh about it, it might make it just a little bit better. But then, in the summer of 2022, something.

unexpected happened. Mitch was gearing up for his 200th episode, and he seemed really excited about it. So he's like, we're nearing the 200. Get ready. It's going to be the best episode we've ever had. He's like hyping everyone up. So we're getting ready for a big 200. And then the next week, I was just driving to work thinking this was the normal podcast we were going to listen to on my way to work like I always do. Hey, retailers, welcome, man. No music, as you can tell. No, this is not an ad read. It's just going to be a different kind of an episode. It's with deep sadness. I am letting you guys know that this is the final episode of the show. This is the final one.

Amber was stunned. After four years of almost weekly episode releases, Mitch was ending retail pharmacy. But the reason Mitch gave was even more surprising. I just, I haven't been okay. I've been struggling, to be honest with you. Because of that, I started to see a path or trajectory or whatever of my life going down an even darker road. I ended up bawling in my car being like, I hope he is fine. And it was very dramatic. Yeah, very, very difficult.

It was a tear-jurking episode. He was crying. I was crying. It was just, it was very tough to listen to. And that's it. The show ends. In a nine-minute and 54-second episode, retail pharmacy is done. And Amber's completely blindsided, crying in the car. There's been no update since. There's been a lot of, like, if you look at the comment section of all the podcasts, everyone's like, I hope you're okay.

I hope everything's going well, that type of thing. Like a lot of love and support from all his viewers. But I've seen, like, Facebook post people like, anyone know if everything's okay, you know, and he's gone. With no new episodes, the retail pharmacy feed stays frozen in time, and Amber stops listening. She goes on with life. She gets a new job, still in the retail pharmacy space, but outside of the metrics-driven world of the big pharmacy chains. And then last November, Amber and Andy had their first baby.

And it's in this chapter of Amber's New Life as a mother that she decides to revisit an old chapter of her life. She decides to listen back to the old episodes of retail pharmacy. But in the process of trying to do that, something strange happens. When Amber pulls up Amazon Music, which is her preferred podcast app, and types in Retel Pharmacy, nothing comes up. So she checks Apple Podcasts. And she can see it's there, but when she clicks on an episode, Amber gets a playback failed message. The same thing happens on CastBox. So now, the only place Amber can still listen to Retail Pharmacy is on Spotify.

And that has made her very nervous. I don't know why it's off the others. I don't know how podcasts works. So I don't know if he has to like renew contracts or do something to keep it there. But I'm assuming at some point if he doesn't do anything, Spotify's probably going to remove it as well. For Amber, the thought of losing this podcast forever feels like losing a friend. So before that happens, Amber and Andy have been trying to figure out how to extract

all 195 episodes of retail pharmacy from Spotify. And so far, they've been failing, which is why they turn to hyperfixed. to find a way to preserve this giant archive of episodes before it disappears forever. Amber doesn't care if they're preserved on a hard drive or a website or whatever. She just wants to know that no matter what happens, they will never really be gone. And there's one more thing that Amber said she wants. Simply put, she wants to know if Mitch is okay. Like, I can't really express to him how much, like, this still haunts me in the back of my mind.

I will still pull up his podcast every couple months to see if he maybe just put some sort of comment or something, you know, just expressing that he's doing better, everything's okay, or like checking Facebook to see if there's any new post because I've seen people posting being like, is he okay? I sure hope he is and like posting a lot of love. But I also don't want to dredge anything up that he doesn't want dredged up, you know, if he's happy being at peace and ignoring the world, I don't want to mess with that. But yeah, if there was any confirmation that he's all good, that would just take one little background emotional stressor out of my life. Coming out of our interview with Amber and Andy, I knew that there could be only one step in this investigation, and that was to contact Mitch. Of course, he was the only one who could tell us how he was doing. But he was also the only person who could get us the entire backlog of his podcast. And not because we couldn't find ways to rip these episodes off of Spotify, but because doing that is considered piracy. And at the end of the day, we were going to have to make an episode about this.

So contacting Mitch seemed like the safest possible path. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little trepidious about reaching out to him. Because if you know anything about my work before Hyperfixed, then you know there was a time not too long ago when I also cut off contact with my listener base. For eight years, I made a show called Reply All, and for all intents and purposes, it was the center of my universe. My relationships and my interests all orbited around the show. It was the thing I most look forward to and my greatest source of pride.

And then, in 2021, my co-host left the show under a cloud of scandal. And for a year after that happened, the show limped along without him. So by the summer of 2022, to be frank, I was a wreck. The emotional toll of being the public face of this tarnished brand was too much for me to bear, and I decided to end it. The last episode of Reply All came out. just one day after Mitch released the final episode of Retail Pharmacy. And if Mitch is anything like me,

I'm sure he agonized over the different ways to discuss the end of the show, how much to make public, and what kind of considerations needed to be made for people who would suffer secondhand from anything said publicly about it. It's an impossible situation to be in, because no single answer will satisfy everyone. So I decided not to say anything at all. The thing I didn't realize until that point

was the Faustian bargain of making a thing that people saw themselves in, that people related to, is that when it changes, it feels like a friend has stopped talking to you. But unlike a real-world friendship, there are parts of this story that were and remain way too personal to share with the world. Because wrapped up in all this business of making a show were very real relationships that did not survive this event. So as much as I wanted to satisfy Amber's question, I was worried about what I would find if we went looking for Mitch. or if he'd even be willing to talk. When he recorded his last episode, he did not sound like he was in great shape.

And since he'd deleted all of his social accounts, we took that to mean that he didn't want to be found. But then, hyperfix producer Lisa Pollock noticed that there was one social media account that Mitch hadn't deleted, his LinkedIn. And from the look of his feed, he was still actively liking and commenting on posts, as recently as a couple weeks before we talked to Amber.

So Lisa sent him a message on LinkedIn. And to our shock, he responded. Holy cow. Wow. Thank you all for being so patient. That's after the break. Welcome back to the show. Before the break, we met Amber, whose job was pushing her to the very edge of her limits until she found something that lifted her out of her funk, a podcast called Retel Pharmacy. The host was a pharmacist named Mitch Lee, and the show's tagline had really resonated with Amber. You are not a lot.

alone. Until suddenly, she was. In the middle of 2022, Mitch had gone dark. Without warning, he'd posted a hurried farewell on his show's feed, and that was it. No more retail pharmacy. Since then, the question of what happened to Mitch and why it happened has been eating at Amber. She eventually made it to the other side of her struggles at work. What if Mitch hadn't? There was only one person who could answer those questions, and we weren't sure he was going to do that. So we were surprised when Mitch promptly responded to our LinkedIn message and agreed to sit down for an interview. So Mitch, how are you doing now? For recovery. I mean, things are amazing.

Remember, all that Amber wanted was to get copies of the podcast and make sure Mitch was okay. But since Mitch was down to talk, we figured we'd ask him about what happened to the podcast. And it turns out the story of what happened to the podcast is tied up in the story of why he created it. Mitch's start in the pharmacy world began at high school, working at a mom-and-pop pharmacy in his hometown of Brunswick, Georgia, and totally loving it. He was good at math and really good with people, so he stuck with it.

Eventually, he got hired as a pharmacist cashier and then a technician, and then he went to pharmacy school. And finally, in 2010, Mitch officially became a pharmacist. He was good at the work, and he cared about it deeply. But the experience of doing this work in a big retail, pharmacy, it wasn't always positive. And like Amber, Mitch quickly started to realize that the shit that happened at work would sometimes follow him home. I would come home from work, Alex, and there would be things that happened at work with patients that I'm thinking to myself,

there's no way that that just happened. Or even in the moment, like, patients will say something and I'm like, and they'll do something just absolutely wild or say the craziest thing, get mad, or do whatever and they walk off and I just like look over at my co-workers I'm like did you anybody else hear that like that's the craziest thing ever can you give me some examples of some of these crazy encounters you had oh man gosh how much time you have I had one that I'll remember for a while um lady very very nasty very upset claimed that the doctor sent her prescription in we can't find it um so sorry ma'am I don't see it here you know can you can't let the doctor know they'd see if they can resend it this is

absolutely absurd as happens every time I come in here. I know they sent it. You're wrong. And then profanity. And so finally, she says, my doctor said they sent it to CVS pharmacy. Now, Alex, I don't work at CVS pharmacy. She was not in the right pharmacy. I have to cop to having done this maybe six months ago, got into the wrong pharmacy and been like, yeah, I'm picking it up. They just called it from the doctor. Now, to be fair, there are often the CBS and the Walgreens always right across the street from each other. They both got the red vibes. They probably look identical on the inside.

So totally good it. But man, she was fired up. Of course, on its own, an incident like this isn't really a big deal. But the fact is that in the world of big retail pharmacies, this kind of stuff happens all the time. Like, really, all the time. And when Mitch would come home after a day of getting kicked around, he felt like he was full of feelings without anywhere to put him. So one day, he's on his way home. He's listening to a podcast.

he's got these crazy war stories floating around in his head, and he gets an idea. What if I made a podcast focused on sharing stories about what it's like to do this job? The stuff that only retail pharmacists would understand and relate to. And through that, maybe this profession that often feels so heavy and lonely

could feel a little lighter and more connected. I wasn't trying to move the needle in our profession and let's fight the system and change pharmacy. I just wanted to... My message was, hey, it sucks. Like, your day might have sucks. Mine did too this week, but we got through it together and we're doing this for a reason. So Mitch bought a $50 microphone and he started recording.

He told himself that he would make 10 episodes and see how it felt. And by episode 10, it already felt amazing. There weren't a ton of listeners, but making this thing gave him a place to put these feelings that frequently followed him home. It was helpful for me because a patient would come in and get really upset. And before the podcast, I kind of held onto that and it was hard for me to leave that the pharmacy. With the show, they would come in and get all upset. And I would just smile and say, well, thank you so much. That was for content for my show. And I could talk about it. And it was kind of a way to relieve stress. By turning these uncomfortable and sometimes traumatic encounters

into content for his podcast, Mitch was able to take back the power they used to have over him. He started adding silly sound effects, the kind he heard on his favorite fantasy football podcast. And he opened his social media channels to story submissions from his listeners. And slowly but surely, the audience began to grow. People started sending in crazy stories about their experiences working in retail pharmacies. Stories about being belittled,

about getting in trouble for going to the restroom, about not being able to eat lunch. Even our friend Amber sent in a story about a patient's blood gushing all over her during a vaccine administration. Let's go to Amber on

Facebook. Hey Mitch Love, the podcast, wanted to respond to your episode about patients bleeding massively during vaccines. Yeah, that's a thing. It sucks. By mid-2020, Mitch's episodes were getting longer,

and they were filled with listener-submitted stories. Soon after that, Mitch realized he was getting enough listener submissions to fill an entire hour-long episode and do it on a weekly basis. It was clear that the show was resonating with people, that it was succeeding in his goal of making people feel less alone. And that became one of Mitch's primary motivations for making it. Why was it important for you to do a weekly show? You sound like my wife, Alex.

That's my wife. She was like, why? There's just a lot happening, especially having recorded through COVID. There was just so much happening. And the feedback that I started getting from listeners was how much the show meant to them, how it was really cathartic for them, how it was helping them get the day. The driving force in the beginning was to help people know they're not alone. And like, we're all in this together.

And to get that feedback. it meant everything. It was everything for me. And so there was an element of like, I've got to keep doing this. Like if I'd stop for a week, like, that's a week that they don't have it in a way, which I hope that doesn't sound conceited. It's more like I just wanted to kind of be there and put it out. So I wanted to at least check in with the listeners once a week. And I, yeah, I got pretty serious about it.

There was a couple of times where I couldn't let it. I didn't have an episode that week, and I was not okay with it. For Mitch, the idea of going on Facebook and telling his listeners, his community, that he didn't have an episode for them, it felt like a personal failure. He knew people were counting on him because they told him they were. They told him he was the thing that got them through the week, which meant that without him, they might not make it through. It was a lot of pressure. And although the podcast wasn't specifically the reason that what happened happened, it was definitely, a part of it. I'm curious if you feel comfortable telling us about the circumstances that led to you

leaving your podcast and your job. Yeah. So I was just carrying a lot. There was a lot of things at work that I just wasn't handling well in the right ways. And my mental health started to go down pretty bad. I started to go down a path of self-medicating that is common for my family. The podcast was incredible. I can't help but think there was an element of it where that started to become more of a weight on my shoulders too. So I came to a breaking point where I had to make a decision. And I remember coming home and just in tears and telling my wife, like, I think I'm done. I can't go back. And it was crazy, Alex, because I had worked at my company for 19 years. But after 19 years with a company, I literally had to message my pharmacy partner and my district manager and say, y'all, I'm sorry, I can't come in tomorrow.

I'm done. 30 minutes after sending that email, Mitch grabbed his microphone and recorded the final episode of retail pharmacy. I think sending that last episode out to say, like, I'm done, there's no more, was by far the hardest part of the whole thing. It was gut-wrenching. I remember hitting except to, like, put to, you know, to the RSS feed, like, sending the show out there in the void and just breaking down because I knew there was kind of no coming back from that. It was hard. It was really, really hard. I felt like I was letting people down.

But to me, stopping the podcast wasn't a question because the message of the show was, I'm in this with you guys. We're in it together. You're not alone. And I felt like I couldn't accurately convey that message if I was not in it with them. So I shut down social media,

quit and shut the podcast up and tied it up a neat little bow and set it on the shelf. In the four years since then, Mitch has been doing a lot better. He got a new job working on the hospital side of the industry, which feels way healthier for him. And he became a father for the first time. As for the podcast, Mitch told us that he kept the episodes up for a while, but then he decided to take them down, mostly because it didn't make sense to maintain a feed he didn't plan to

continue. Because in order to keep retail pharmacy up online, he needed to pay the app he used to distribute it a yearly fee. But since he didn't think anyone cared or listened anymore, when it came time to renew, he let his account lapse, and the podcast came down everywhere. everywhere except Spotify, of course, because Spotify, unlike all other podcast apps, makes a copy of your files and stores them on their server. If you delete your RSS feed, Spotify's supposed to check to see if it's still there,

and if it's gone, Spotify will eventually delete their copies too. Which means at any moment, the retail pharmacy feed could still vanish from Spotify. So when Mitch heard the story behind why we reached out to him, heard that there was a woman named Amber who still cared and still listened, and that she was worried she'd lose access to the episodes once Spotify dropped the feed. Mitch was so moved that he offered to build a custom Google Drive filled with all 195 episodes of retail pharmacy as a special gift to Amber.

And when we reconnected with her about a week later and presented her with this gift, Amber was thrilled. But the thing that really landed with Amber was this recorded message that Mitch made just for her. Amber, oh my gosh, I am so humble. when I heard that there was somebody actually still listening to the retail pharmacy podcast. You are the type of person that I created the show for. I'm so happy that you reached out and that you were wishing me well. And I'm sorry that it ended the way it did.

There was a lot going on with everything, which I'm sure you're aware of. But I am so glad you reached out. I'm so thankful to you as a listener, both while it was going and still to this day. I'm amazed and it just made my day to hear about that. So I'm so thankful for you and I just wish you the best of luck in your career. I'm sorry. That's amazing. Why did that provoke such a strong reaction from you?

I just feel like I've spent four years just being so worried that, you know, this career that's just so hard and such... Such a difficult thing for so many people to maintain took down someone that I really cared about. Though I don't know him, I just, I've spent four years just so scared that, you know, no one's ever heard from him. What if he's not okay? Just getting the relief that he's really doing well. It's just the silliest weight off my shoulders that I've been dragging around for a long time. I don't think that's silly at all.

I think that's genuinely very sweet. And, you know, Mitch could not have been more humbled and appreciative. He was so happy to hear it. And I don't think it was ever his intention to just cut everybody off and, like, be, I don't think it was his intention to let people down. I think it was more like he needed a clean break. And if he didn't make this very significant break where he pulled back from this part of his life, he wasn't going to be able to sort of rebuild in a way that he needed to.

It wasn't until I listened back to this tape that I realized when I said all of this, I wasn't really talking about the relationship between Mitch and Amber. As much as I try not to make these stories about myself, this was something I'd been trying to figure out how to say to my own audience. the ones that felt let down by the end of reply all. Because I know for a lot of people, the lack of information has been frustrating. But I hope it's enough to know that I'm okay. And that I'm so grateful you're here.

Hyperfixed is produced and edited by Emma Cortland, Amoryeates, Kat Shookneck, and Lisa Pollock. This episode was engineered by Tony Williams. Music is by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and me. You can get bonus episodes, access to our Discord, and much more by becoming a premium member at hyperfixedpod.com slash join. We also have merch at shop.com.com and we have tickets to our live show at tickets.com. The live show is coming up in just a couple weeks, so I implore you to please grab

tickets while are still available. Tickets.hyperfixpod.com for our show on September 11th at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn, New York. Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover Audio with Vision at Radiotopia.fm. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you soon. Radiotopia.