[No. 141] The Dark Side of Drugstores (10): "Why the Supremacy of Opening New Stores Exhausts the Front Lines"

"Open XX new stores this fiscal year."

In financial results announcements and medium-term management plans, store opening targets are often prominently displayed.

The number of store openings is an indicator easily treated as clear proof of growth.

However, what is sacrificed behind the scenes is rarely discussed.

The Reality of Store-Opening Supremacy

For many chains, the number of store openings serves as an easy-to-understand message to the stock market and business partners.

It is not uncommon for store opening targets to be placed at the center of management plans to demonstrate that the company is "growing."

However, in the rush to open new stores, the decision to pull experienced personnel from existing stores is made on a daily basis.

As a result, while new stores bustle with opening-day excitement, the existing stores from which staff were pulled continue to operate with depleted resources.

Why This Structure Emerges

The reason lies in the fact that the "new achievement" of opening a store is easier to evaluate than the "maintenance" of existing stores.

Personnel involved in launching new stores can demonstrate their achievements in a way that is easily visible to management.

On the other hand, maintaining existing stores is often only evaluated passively as "not having deteriorated."

This asymmetry in the evaluation structure creates a motive to concentrate talented personnel in new stores.

Furthermore, store opening plans themselves are sometimes decided without sufficient consideration for the staffing situation on the front lines.

It is a structure where the decision to "open" comes first, and the consideration of "who will run it" is left for later.

The Harmful Effects Caused by This Structure

Harmful Effect 1: Qualitative Deterioration of Existing Stores
In existing stores where experienced personnel have been pulled to new stores, customer service quality and ordering accuracy tend to decline.

This is a quiet deterioration that does not appear in the easy-to-understand indicator of store opening numbers.

Harmful Effect 2: Personnel Development Cannot Keep Up
If the speed of training store managers and veteran staff cannot keep up with the pace of store openings, inexperienced personnel are forced into positions of responsibility.

This becomes a factor that causes variations in service quality at both new and existing stores.

Harmful Effect 3: The Chain of Exhaustion
Personnel mobilized for new store openings may find themselves repeatedly transferred every time a new store is opened thereafter.

Such personnel end up working while carrying a chronic burden, which ironically leads to the most talented individuals becoming exhausted and leaving the company.

What the ideal state should be

A growth strategy based on opening new stores should not be denied in itself.

As trade areas shrink, capturing new trade areas is an important management decision.

The problem lies in the fact that the goal of 'quantity'—the number of store openings—takes precedence, while the design of the 'people' who support it is left as an afterthought.

The ideal state is to examine store opening plans and human resource development plans simultaneously in the same meeting body.

Specifically:
• Always require a 'staffing plan' to be submitted as a set with the store opening plan.

• Track the subsequent careers and burdens of personnel involved in new store launches, and visualize the concentration of burdens on specific individuals.

• Treat the 'maintenance and improvement' of existing stores as an evaluation axis equal to that of store openings in management meetings.

Concrete proposals for system design

• Incorporate the outlook for securing human resources—specifically, 'who will take the lead at the new store'—as a mandatory item in the decision-making process for store openings.

• Track the transfer history and burden status of those with experience in launching new stores as HR data, and establish rules to limit consecutive transfers.

• Regularly report the retention rates and development status of store managers and staff at existing stores as management indicators alongside the number of store openings.

These are not intended to slow down the speed of store openings.

They are mechanisms for growing while protecting the foundation of 'people' that supports store openings.

Conclusion

The number of store openings is an easy-to-understand indicator of growth.

However, if the quality of existing stores is declining and personnel are becoming exhausted behind the scenes, it cannot be called growth in the true sense.

What we should be looking at is not how many stores have been opened, but whether the personnel supporting those openings are able to continue working in a healthy state.

The speed of expansion versus the sustainability of the front lines.

Whether or not these two are balanced is the dividing line that determines if a company is truly growing.

Next time
The Dark Side of Drugstores (11)
'Why the Gap Between Headquarters KPIs and Front-Line Reality Cannot Be Bridged'

*Written based on my experience as a drugstore merchandise manager and store operations manager, as well as from a front-line perspective, by abstracting and reconstructing actual events. This does not refer to any specific company, but rather describes structures common to the industry.