Putting a pharmacy in every store, and aiming at 70% (2013)

Choosing dispensing as the axis of differentiation

The essential point of this decision lies in not letting a drugstore end as a place that sells goods, but building dispensing in as part of the selling floor. Hokuriku, with its low rate of prescription issuance, the company saw not as a disadvantage but as room left over. It put a dispensing space and a pharmacist in every store and waited for the rate to rise; when the policy currents of separating prescribing from dispensing, and of drug-price revision, pushed drugstore-attached pharmacies forward, the facilities and staff arranged in advance were there to receive it. That the attachment ratio was made a headline metric under a president who is himself a pharmacist also worked as a device for showing, inside and outside the company, that dispensing would not be put off.

A target of 70%, however, is not as easy to reach as it is to announce. Dispensing only works once a licensed pharmacist has been secured for each store, and if the training of people cannot keep pace with the speed of openings, the ratio hits a ceiling. The company’s ratio has risen from about half to just short of seventy per cent, and at the time of writing still falls short of the target. Rather than chasing numbers, the question is how far a demanding function like dispensing can be embedded across a store network. In a drugstore sector competing on price and fresh food, this decision reflects both the possibility of building a business around dispensing as the axis of differentiation, and the difficulty of it.