Thirty years of experience walked out in one afternoon.

I worked in the Boots head office in Nottingham for eighteen years. I know that building. I know the history of this company — the founding, the values, the transformation over decades. When the cuts came, I was in a room with people who between them had over three hundred years of institutional knowledge. Pharmacists, buyers, supply chain specialists, people who'd built careers here. We got the same corporate language everyone gets. The experience left in that room wasn't just sad for us individually. It's the kind of knowledge that takes decades to build and cannot be replicated by whoever they hire next at a lower cost. Boots is still a respected brand. The infrastructure of expertise under it is being quietly hollowed out.