Your pharmacy doesn't have a footfall problem

Roughly 150 people will walk into your pharmacy today because they have to.

They've chosen you over the supermarket, over the multiple down the road, over ordering online. They'll stand in your shop for four to eight minutes waiting. And most of them will leave holding a single white bag.

That's the part worth sitting with. Not the customers who didn't come in — the ones who did.

When an independent wants to grow, the conversation almost always turns outward. A leaflet drop. Social media. A new service to bring people through the door. Longer hours.

It's a reasonable instinct. It's also usually the most expensive way to solve the problem, and almost always the slowest.

Because the assumption underneath it is that growth requires more people. And for most independent pharmacies, that assumption is wrong.

You have a conversion problem. They are not the same thing, and they don't cost the same to fix.

Footfall costs money to buy. Conversion costs attention to fix.

Here's the shape of it — illustrative numbers, but run yours and the pattern holds.

Say 150 prescription collections a day, six days a week. That's 900 people a week standing in your pharmacy, who already chose you.

Now the number almost nobody measures: what percentage of them buy anything else?

No extra footfall. No marketing budget. No new service to recruit for, train for and get accredited. The same people, on the same days, in the same shop.

Two honest caveats. That jump isn't automatic — it's the result of specific changes, not enthusiasm. And £6 is a guess; your average will differ. The point isn't the exact figure. The point is that a shift in a number you've never measured is worth more than most of the things currently on your list.

Three reasons, and none of them are about your team working hard enough.

Nobody can see it. Attachment rate isn't on any dashboard. Your PMR counts items. Your EPOS counts sales. Almost nothing tells you how often those two things happened to the same person on the same visit. Invisible numbers don't get managed.

The waiting spot sells nothing. Stand where your customers stand while they wait. Most of the time they're looking at a queue, a counter, or a wall of information leaflets. Four to eight minutes of undivided attention, pointed at nothing.

Your shop is arranged for stock-keeping, not for selling. Grouping products by category is logical — for the person doing the ordering. But the customer collecting a course of antibiotics isn't thinking in categories. They're thinking about the next four days. Whether the thing that helps is near the collection point, or three aisles away in its correct section, is a merchandising decision most owners have never made deliberately.

For one week, count two things at the till:

That's it. Two tallies on a sheet of paper. No system change, no spend, no staff meeting.

Divide the second by the first. That's your attachment rate.

You'll probably find it lower than you expected. That's normal, and it's the useful part — it means the gap is real and it's yours to close.

Put the tally sheet out tomorrow morning. Not next month, not after the refit. Tomorrow.

You'll know more about your shop's commercial reality by Saturday than most owners learn in a year.

When you've got the number, hit reply and tell me what it was. I read every one, and the numbers people send me shape what gets written here.

Next week: what to actually do with that number — and why the answer usually isn't "train the staff to upsell."

Pollyanna