The narrative of a “retail apocalypse” has been a persistent headline, but it misses the real story. The challenge for retail leaders today isn’t a simple decline; it’s a fundamental restructuring of the retail ecosystem.
Author: YOOBIC Content Team
What if the biggest factor in your store’s success wasn’t location, product assortment, or even foot traffic — but the person running it?
Research from the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago analyzed two major retail chains and found that individual store managers account for 25-35% of productivity differences between locations.
The study tracked manager transfers across stores, isolating their direct impact on performance.
The findings make one thing clear: A great manager can transform a store, while a weak one can quietly drain its potential.
Let’s break down the findings — and what they mean for the future of retail leadership.
What You’ll Learn in This Article:
How replacing a low-performing manager with a top-performing one can increase store productivity by 50-100% — and why most retailers aren’t tracking this impact.Why high-performing managers are often placed in struggling stores — and how that could be costing companies up to 6% in sales.How strong managers improve not just sales, but operational efficiency, team engagement, and crisis response.What leading retailers are doing differently to identify, develop, and place top managers for maximum impact.
Finding #1: Great Managers Can 2X Store Productivity — But Most Retailers Aren’t Measuring It
The study found that swapping a low-performing manager (bottom 10%) for a high-performing one (top 10%) increases store productivity by 50-100%.
That’s the equivalent of adding an extra full-time employee — without hiring anyone.
The Problem
Despite this, many retailers don’t have systems in place to measure individual manager impact. Instead, they rely on broad store-level performance metrics that fail to isolate how much of a store’s success — or struggles — comes down to the person leading it.
As a result:
- Many companies promote managers based on tenure, assuming experience equates to effectiveness.
- High performers aren’t recognized or rewarded consistently, leading to disengagement and attrition.
- Retailers lack structured systems to track how much a manager contributes to store-level KPIs.
What Retailers Should Be Doing
To truly understand managerial impact, retailers need better tracking systems and data-driven evaluation methods. That means shifting from subjective decision-making to performance-based leadership development.
- Track execution, engagement, and productivity data to assess managerial impact beyond just top-line sales.
- Identify high-impact managers using objective metrics — not just instinct or tenure.
- Recognize and reward performance based on store-level results, ensuring that top performers stay engaged and motivated.
Finding #2: Retailers are Misplacing Their Best Managers — and Leaving Sales on the Table
One of the study’s most surprising insights? High-performing managers are often placed in struggling stores. This makes sense at first glance — companies want strong leaders to turn around weak locations.
However, the research suggests that this reactive approach overlooks a major opportunity: If retailers placed top managers in already-successful stores, they could see company-wide sales increase by 2-6%.
The Problem
While placing strong leaders in low-performing stores can help stabilize them, it often prevents top managers from achieving their full potential. Retailers spend time fixing underperforming locations while missing out on compounding gains in high-performing stores.
As a result:
- Many retailers assign managers reactively rather than strategically.
- There is too much focus on damage control instead of performance maximization.
- Few companies have a data-driven framework to measure and predict manager impact across multiple stores.
What Retailers Should Be Doing
To optimize business performance, retailers need to rethink how they deploy their best talent.
- Use performance data to guide manager placement, not just gut instinct.
- Balance turnaround strategies with growth opportunities for high-performing locations.
- Develop a proactive leadership pipeline to ensure managers are placed where they can drive the greatest impact.
Finding #3: A Great Manager Does More Than Sell — They Build Stronger, More Resilient Stores
The study found that manager quality doesn’t just impact sales — it drives broader operational efficiencies.
For example:
- High-performing managers lead more productive teams, improving labor efficiency without increasing headcount.
- They also drive higher energy efficiency, cutting costs without sacrificing performance.
- Managers who performed well pre-COVID also outperformed during the crisis, proving that strong leadership creates long-term resilience.
The Problem
Retailers often see sales as the primary measure of success, but they underestimate how much great managers improve efficiency, morale, and crisis preparedness. When companies fail to recognize these factors, they:
- Underinvest in leadership training, assuming management skills develop naturally over time.
- Fail to equip managers with the right tools and insights to improve performance.
- Overlook succession planning, leading to talent gaps when top managers leave.
What Retailers Should Be Doing
To build resilient, high-performing teams, retailers must prioritize manager development and empowerment.
- Develop structured leadership training programs focused on operational excellence, team engagement, and crisis management.
- Equip managers with AI-driven insights to help them optimize execution and coach their teams in real time.
- Create knowledge-sharing systems where top managers mentor others, scaling best practices across multiple stores.
How to Turn Insights into Action
The research is clear: Managers can make or break store performance. Retailers need to track, support, and empower their frontline leaders to maximize store performance.
What top retailers are doing differently:
- Measuring manager impact, not just store performance.
- Using data — not tenure — to guide leadership decisions.
- Investing in tools that empower managers to lead more effectively.
Unlock the Full Potential of Your Store Managers with YOOBIC
Great managers don’t just drive sales — they create more productive teams, stronger store operations, and higher employee engagement. But without the right tools, even the best leaders can struggle to reach their full potential.
YOOBIC helps retailers track, support, and empower store managers with AI-driven insights, real-time execution tools, and mobile-first training — so they can lead more effectively and maximize store performance.
With YOOBIC, retailers can:
- Measure manager effectiveness in real time by tracking execution, engagement, and performance across stores.
- Digitize store visits and task execution to improve consistency and efficiency.
- Provide AI-driven insights to help managers make smarter decisions and coach their teams more effectively.
- Equip managers with mobile-first training so they can upskill in real time, directly on the shop floor.
- Streamline communication across stores so managers stay informed and aligned with company goals.
- Boost employee engagement and retention by enabling managers to recognize and motivate their teams.
Ready to see how YOOBIC drives results for top retailers like Michaels, Mattress Firm, Ralph Lauren, Pilot Flying J, and Lidl?
Attend one of our 20-minute interactive live demos. No slides, no sales pitch — just real solutions for real challenges.
The way customers shop and dine has evolved. As a result, the roles of the frontline employees working in stores and restaurants have also evolved to include more responsibilities, heavier workloads and a constant need for knowledge and information to keep up with customers.
If stores are an untapped goldmine of data waiting to be found, store visits and audits are how retailers strike gold.
They monitor and measure valuable data about the in-store experience.
Related: The Complete Guide to Retail Store Visits and Audits
But how can that data be extracted from such a complex, qualitative environment and manufactured into the shiny 24K items we all know and love?
Store visit reports.
Data and insight pulled from store visit reports help store and area managers improve, and help HQ give stores exactly what they need to deliver a flawless customer experience.
So if visit reports don’t contain the right information, or have the right information in the wrong format, retailers can’t get the data they need.
They’re going to end up sluicing through a lot of mud for a really long time.
For most retailers we speak with, area managers create their visit reports by manually collating data into a Powerpoint presentation or a spreadsheet, and then emailing it to the regional team. Jumping between applications for form and data collection is also a common practice.
These ways of creating a report are time-consuming, have too much detail or not enough, and don’t help the retailer quantify store KPIs.
The right store visit report taps into valuable data from stores and creates a ripple effect of positive change that spreads far wider than merely helping the store perform better.
And to make creating the perfect report easy, retailers need a standardized store visit template for the entire organization.
The perfect store visit report template:
- Clarifies expectations for the store manager – no more frustration from trying to decipher exactly what the area manager meant or why certain comments were made
- Helps area managers identify which store teams they need to spend the most time with and tailor their approach for each store
- Helps head office understand why issues are cropping up and take steps to prevent them from happening
- Helps other departments like maintenance and IT to monitor and fix issues
- Helps brands understand competitor product placement and negotiate a better commercial strategy with retailers
- Improves customer experience and increases conversion rate and basket size
“"When constructing a store visit report template, it's critical to ensure that you're giving the user a sense of flow around the store. Make sure it reflects every key point, allows conversation with the store manager, and enables the user to create specific actions which can be easily followed up on."”
Bahareh G, Head of Strategic Accounts @ YOOBIC
The perfect report template delivers data that helps the entire organization improve. Here’s how to create one that’s perfect for your stores, area managers and your entire organization.
Related: 5 Common Problems with Retail Store Visits and How to Fix Them
1) Make it scannable.
Our attention spans are short. It’s estimated that 55% of people viewing any webpage spend fewer than 15 seconds reading it. Working in retail is like having 35 browser tabs open in your brain all the time, except instead of tabs they’re things that needed to be done yesterday. Store visit reports should reflect this reality. Build a summary section into the template that tells the reader everything they need to know, including:
- Key findings from the previous visit
- Whether the store passed/failed and is compliant/non-compliant
- The area manager’s recommendations
A bit like a clickbait list post you’d find on Buzzfeed, visit reports need to be easy to digest and even fun to read if retailers are to mine valuable data from the store visit (you won’t believe number 7!).
2) Make it standardized.
The perfect store visit report leaves no room for interpretation in its findings.
This goes further than the report itself, because it means area managers must evaluate stores using a standardized set of questions with a standardized set of answers, whether the answers are yes or no or 5 stars out of 5.
If anyone reading the report is to gain a full picture of how stores are performing, the report has to have sections that are consistent across the entire network, such as visual merchandising, uniform standards, stock levels and so on.
Break up the report template according to the most important focus areas of the visit and give stores a score for each. This enables area managers to get the full picture of how each store is performing, where it’s weaknesses are and compare it with others in the network.
3) Make it visual.
Include lots of space in the template for store pictures taken by the area manager. Anyone reading the report, especially head office, should be able to visualize being inside the store. Retail is visual, and photos are a huge part of data.
4) Make it actionable.
All the detail in the world is irrelevant if it doesn’t trigger improvement.
A quick scan of the report should reveal what recommendations the area manager made after the last visit, as well as what action she’ll be taking after the current one. This helps store managers fully understand what’s expected of them and helps the area manager make the most productive use of their time on the next visit.
The perfect visit report should open up a dialogue between the store and area manager, and should help HQ understand how they can give stores and area teams the resources they need to perform their best.
Related: Why Retailers Need to Align Sales and Operational Data
5) Make it quick.
The perfect store visit report is one that’s automatically generated and doesn’t require hours of data collation in the back office or the car.
By digitizing store visit procedures using an app like YOOBIC, area managers can generate a standardized visit report with the click of a button. Taking the time and effort out of report creation gives area managers the bandwidth to focus their time where it really matters – building relationships with store teams and assigning action plans for improvement.
Interested in learning more about how to strike gold with every store visit? Download the Ultimate Guide to Improving Store Visits, featuring an interview with Halfords UK!
The Ultimate Guide to Improving Retail Store Visits
Retail success starts on the store floor. Yet too often, store visits and audits fall short of their true potential — leaving area managers overwhelmed and stores struggling to keep up. It’s time to change that
Photo from Le Parisien
Last year, our CEO, Fabrice, made the leap across the pond to open an office in New York. Everyone knows the Big Apple is one of the shopping capitals of the world – but how does it compare to London? We sat down with Fabrice to hear about his experiences with US retail since becoming a New Yorker.
1. What have you learned about retail since taking YOOBIC to NYC?
Retail is ultimately all about people. And because of that, stores need to make their staff a top priority again. Store staff are brand ambassadors, to such an extent that some flagship stores have removed sales incentives because the job should be more about providing a positive customer experience than about short-term sells. The theory is that if the experience is amazing, people will ultimately buy from you, whether it be in-store or online. Experience builds loyalty.
Essentially, stores are becoming showrooms and experiential destinations, with sales almost becoming a secondary aim. This is a new way of approaching store operations in the era of online shopping. Some brands, such as Coach, have even started to produce new store concepts with the primary goal of being a place for visitors to hang out, take selfies and experience the brand in a new way. This might be a little too radical for me personally, but it’s certainly an interesting approach!
2. How does being in a city where so many retailers trial their newest and most innovative concepts impact your thoughts on where YOOBIC is going?
From Nike’s impressive new concept store, to Chanel’s brand-new Atelier Beauté (the first of its kind), it is amazing to see so much innovation concentrated in one city. You can feel the vibe and the energy of the city in those initiatives, not only in terms of cutting-edge technology (like Nike) but also when it comes to innovative visual merchandising.
But the key question is, how do you scale that up to 200 stores across the country and still maintain the same level of excellence?
Once again, it is all about people and processes – and this is where YOOBIC can play a role. We are working with brands such as Lacoste to ensure that the merchandiser’s vision is properly implemented and that the quality of customer experience is perfect across the board.
3. What’s different about retail in NYC vs London?
Wholesale and outlets play a significant role in the US retail economy, more so than in the UK it seems.
Being able to guarantee consistency in those channels is a real challenge. Brands have very little visibility into, or control over, what’s happening in-store. On top of that, store visits are quite expensive, and they’re also not very efficient. Wholesalers have also decreased their staff in-store, significantly reducing the level of execution and ultimately impacting the global customer experience.
4. In your experience, what’s the biggest challenge the physical store will face in 2019 (in New York/the US)?
I truly believe that the biggest challenge right now is around empowering the sales staff.
To do this, retailers need to change their mentality towards their employees. Store staff are not a resource, they are an asset. The more you invest in them, the better your stores will perform – employees who feel valued do better.
Technology is the key to making this a priority for retailers. Currently, the situation is usually that sales associates are trained when they first start work, and then it’s never thought about again. What’s needed instead is a system of continuous, digitised microlearning, to help store teams grow and keep them engaged.
5. What’s the best thing about living in NYC? (That isn’t retail or work-related)
The energy of the city!
6. And what’s the worst thing about living in NYC?
…The energy of the city 😉
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Want to join our US team in New York? We’re hiring! Check out our current vacancies here.