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A friend of mine is a Vet at a place recently sold to a PE firm. If your wait times are crazy long, if you can't get through on a phone, if you realize your vet
by briandoll 3y ago
A friend of mine is a Vet at a place recently sold to a PE firm. If your wait times are crazy long, if you can't get through on a phone, if you realize your vet's office has parted ways with the great vet you used to see -- that's the PE firm counting beans and destroying the service for customers in an effort to squeeze every dollar out of the system.
As a specific obviously bad example -- Vet services in California are kinda seasonal. More visits in summer than winter, due to more time outdoors, etc. A PE firm looked at visits on a weekly basis and saw a downward trend in the winter and decided to re-set staffing based on that. Now that summer has arrived they are severely short staffed, have parted ways with great vets, and now wait times are horrific.
Thanks PE!
- snapetom 3y agoMy wife is a vet for a corporate owned hospital and our circle of friends are naturally very vet centric. They run the gamut from PE vets, corp vets, and private owners. We know GPS, specialists, dogs and cats only, large animal, exotics. What you are describing is not PE specific. Staffing issues, primarily technicians, have hit everyone across the board. It’s a combination of wages, training, quality of life. Moreover, COVID caused a dramatic demand in vet services but protocols decreased the amount of patients seen. Only now is there starting to be some relief on that. Maybe PE reacted in a way that was not the wisest in your friend’s opinion, but everyone scrambled and few succeeded.
- pc86 3y agoI dated a vet tech several years before COVID and it sounded like a horrendous job. $20/hr was considered good pay, you're constantly bending over, pickup up things (sometimes things that definitively do not to get picked up), and you're literally dealing with some of the shittiest parts of animal care.
- TylerE 3y agoBetter than doing the same work with heavier patients in nursing homes for $12/hr.
- slimsag 3y agoThe level of mental trauma endured by vets I doubt is matched by elderly care nurses.
- primax 3y agoMy wife worked in aged care. There are plenty of nasty or racist old people in aged care that make their job awful
- WalterBright 3y agoMy dad spent his last 3 years in a nursing home. When he passed, the nurses cried. I was surprised, I thought they were just doing a job and didn't actually care. I was wrong, and was very grateful to them.
- midoridensha 3y agoHe was probably one of the really nice people they took care of, unlike the nasty old men that constantly sexually harassed and assaulted them, so he made their day a lot brighter and was one of the reasons they stayed with the job.
- agentgumshoe 3y agoYou've spent a fair bit of time in a number of nursing homes?
- iancmceachern 3y agoIt definitely is, source - my sister managed an elderly care facility during the pandemic
- waboremo 3y agoI would say they are definitely in the same range that any difference is negligible. Working in either shatters the soul in record breaking speed. The terrible things you have to witness. Humanity at its rawest and at times lowest. Both groups, no matter how many times you have to deal with the certain situations they do, you never get used to it (which is kind of important, as soon as you do get used to it, you've lost what makes you such a good nurse/vet - empathy).
- snapetom 3y agoI would add that vet techs in many states (most maybe?) are licensed and require training in associate degree programs. Most these days have bachelor's and I've even known someone with a master's who volunteered in ecological research projects in her spare time. So yeah, with $20/hour imagine having a college degree and making $42k/year. Veterinary care up and down, including for veterinarians, is a field that is really not as lucrative as other fields that require a similar level of education.
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y agoThat may be at the hourly wage level, but from office manager to above, including specialists, they are making money. Much more so in states where regulation is strict for said jobs
- epups 3y agoWhy wouldn't your friend just open up a practice and compete with this dysfunctional company?
- quickthrowman 3y agoSome vets just want to practice veterinary medicine instead of running a business. Start to finish, a vet clinic buildout is going to run you $1M+, and any lender is going to want a personal guarantee that uses your home and other personal assets as collateral if they’re lending to a new business owner. You could certainly find investors, but then you’ll have people wanting an ROI. I could come up with more reasons, but those two are probably the main ones. My grandfather opened and ran two veterinary clinics in the 1970s. He sold both of them in the 1980s, one of them is still around. The other one closed after the buyer, another veterinarian, killed himself after the building and land were eminent domained for a freeway expansion and he felt he wasn’t paid enough for the land by the government.
- singleshot_ 3y agoMaybe because now that the retail vet is destroyed and rich people need vets who are not pathologically inconvenient and terrible, there is a brisk market for retained private vets. This is a trend I’ve noticed that goes along with “enshittification” wherein the normal thing (let’s take grocery stores as an example) become either so downmarket-oriented (e.g., Dollar General) or aggravating (e.g., self-checkout lanes, poor inventory management, objectionable customer service) that they abandon the middle market and become intolerable. At that point the upper part of the market diverges, and something like personal shoppers becomes the norm for anyone who can afford it. On one hand, people in the middle class get squeezed by salary, and on the other hand they get squeezed because they hate Dollar General and they can’t afford a butler to shop for them. Real nice system we have here.
- WalterBright 3y ago[flagged]
- 3y ago
- ProjectArcturis 3y ago[flagged]
- vecter 3y agoThat sounds bad for the customer, but how does that play out for the owners? Does this sort of behavior end up working out better for them financially? If so, despite how bad it sounds, it does seem like they end up with more efficient economics (assuming it's sustainable). If not, then surely the PE firms will suffer too right?
- gtop3 3y agoSome thoughts on how this would playout: * Reduced staff costs. * Reduced potential peak. If you're at capacity during peak it might be worth the extra staff costs to capture the revenue. * Reduced staffing flexibility. Things like vacations, parental leave, etc become tighter. * Reduced customer satisfaction. I've stopped going to places when they lose my favorite staff member, and places a lot less consequential than a vet. This might translate to loss customers in the mid term, but you might not notice until their next vet visit in ~12 months. This might translate to bad yelp reviews. * Presumably most of those vets let go are going to continue to be vets. It's a high skill job that pays well and people get into it for passion. That means your competition just gained access to a resource. Or maybe those vets become your new competition.
- agentgumshoe 3y agoIf you read the article, it spends a lot of time speaking to how the equity firms separate themselves from downsides.
- WalterBright 3y agoSo start a Vet outfit and take their customers away.
- itairal 3y ago[dead]
- agentgumshoe 3y agoThe article talks to that and how business now advertise in caps "NOT PRIVATE EQUITY OWNED." Surely that's an easy antitrust win to point out, it's gotta be causing significant consumer harm to be labelled so boldly as a selling point!