Listing Rite Aid location that doesn’t exist on Rite Aid appointment site
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A search for “10011” is yielding a listing for “Rite Aid - 501 6th Avenue, New York, NY, 10011” with appointments supposedly available. Yet, searching for “10011” on the Rite Aid site doesn’t yield any location at that address, not even one that has no appointment slots.
I found a location here: https://www.riteaid.com/locations/ny/new-york/501-6th-avenue.html
To clarify:
The Rite Aid search is returning a Rite Aid location that does not show up on their vaccine search and doesn’t appear to be vaccinating people.
@avidrissman did some digging for you and unfortunately it looks like this might be an issue out of our hands.
I'm not an active contributor (yet) but it appears that the data comes in through an internal RiteAid API
I grabbed the storename from @Lynne-Daniels comment (thank you!) and got the following
https://www.riteaid.com/services/ext/v2/vaccine/checkSlots?storeNumber=04261
I can only guess what slot 1&2 mean (I'm guessing dose one vs two), but it appears that they're reporting this store has vaccines. Hence the vaccine spotter is too.
Unfortunately not sure there's much we can do about this one :(
(P.S. Did some digging on the RiteAid side of things and when you search the zip 10011 on their site it doesn't even show you any locations, which there definitely are since if you add one and search 10012 you get 10 stores. So I'd imagine there's some weirdness in the 10011 twilight zone. Maybe just give the pharmacy a call and see if they're offering appointments)
Ah, thank you all for the detailed example, this really helps.
As @babbitt found, what's happened is that the timeslots API for that store is still reporting availability at this location. But the store search no longer reports that the store carries the vaccine (identified by PREF-112 in their store search API). So I think we can resolve this by refreshing the store metadata every so often for Rite Aid locations (to catch any store level changes like this), in addition to the more frequent time slot checks. This mirrors how we have to handle some other providers, like Walmart, to catch these type of store-level changes, this was just something I hadn't accounted for with Rite Aid.
I'm working on a fix now and should have it deployed shortly. Thanks again for brining this up!
This Rite Aid does have vaccines and free vaccine appointments. If you mess around in the JavaScript console when booking an appointment, you can change the store number to that store (4261) and get the free appointment slots. You can then book the appointment successfully. My friend did so and just got her vaccine at store 4261.
It may be outside the scope of this project but if that "messing around in the console" is something we can package up (maybe as a bookmark) we could probably help people get more appointments
FYI we have more data. The appointments are real, but the reason the Rite Aid store isn’t listed is because it’s being closed in two weeks. All the remaining appointment slots are filled up, so I’m not sure any project to help people “mess around in the console” will be a good use of time.
To see if slots **may be ** available go to your browser and put in this url https://www.riteaid.com/services/ext/v2/vaccine/checkSlots?storeNumber=####
where #### is the store number you are interested in.
You will see either:
{"Data":{"slots":{"1":true,"2":false}},"Status":"SUCCESS","ErrCde":null,"ErrMsg":null,"ErrMsgDtl":null}
OR
{"Data":{"slots":{"1":false,"2":false}},"Status":"SUCCESS","ErrCde":null,"ErrMsg":null,"ErrMsgDtl":null}
OR
blank
if you get the first one with Data.slots[1] = true
then appointments may be available.
if you get either of the other two, appointments are **definitely not *** available and not waste your time going through the riteaid.com website process.
Of course, just write a script to poll this url to make life even easier. Worked great for me! I polled for three days then suddenly got the Data.slots[1]=true and went to the riteaid website....mission accomplished! PS: I found that many of the stores in my area opened up appointments at 5:00pm weekdays, but this does certainly vary. My store opened up at 10:00am Saturday morning; and others seem to be doing so right now as well (Sat 11L00am)