Years ago, a VP of visual merchandising visited one of my stores. It was 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday. She walked behind the register, found the volume knob, and cranked the music up. “We want it to feel like a party in here,” she said. Then she took out a Sharpie and marked a line on the knob, so every future manager would know the correct volume.

I nodded. I also knew I’d turn it back down the second she left the building.

Corporate called it a standards issue. HQ had decided that a person who spends two hours a year in a store should override the judgment of the person who spends forty. I knew that store’s traffic patterns inside out: grandparents and moms on a mission in the morning, high schoolers by 3 p.m., date-night couples after dinner. Each group needed something different from the room. A fixed line on a volume knob can’t account for that. A store leader can, in real time.

That gap — between what corporate mandates and what the floor actually knows — is still costing retailers money and attention today. Sephora just gave us a clean example of it.

The two-hour rollout that took months to build

Sephora recently announced “Quiet Hours”: lower lights, lower music, aimed at better serving neurodiverse shoppers. It’s a good instinct. It’s also a useful case study in retail operations efficiency — or the lack of it.

Here’s what, I’m sure, it took to get there: rounds of internal debate, data collection and analysis, a pilot in select stores, memos, district manager check-ins, more data, more calls, and finally a PR rollout. The output of all that process: quiet hours for the first hour after opening, two days a week. Two hours, total, per week.

Run the math on that. Multiply the hours of executive time, the coordination overhead, and the pilot-and-measure cycle against the actual footprint of the change. A store manager empowered to run a quieter opening shift and hand-pick the morning playlist could have made — and did make, in stores like mine — the equivalent call in a single conversation, at zero incremental cost, tailored to that store’s actual traffic instead of a chain-wide average.

That’s the tax on centralized decision-making: not that the decision is wrong, but that it’s slow, expensive, and blunt. It optimizes for consistency across thousands of stores instead of accuracy in any one of them.

What decentralized decision rights actually look like

Contrast that with Barnes & Noble. Their turnaround runs on a simple structural choice: store managers select the book inventory for their own location, based on their own neighborhood. No corporate buyer dictating a universal list. That’s the operating model, and it’s a documented reason the chain has been opening stores again instead of closing them.

For executives evaluating where their own organization sits on this spectrum, three questions are more useful than another round of pilot data:

Where do we require a chain-wide standard when a local judgment call would perform better? Store hours, merchandising resets, and safety protocols usually need consistency. Music volume, maybe not.

How much executive and analyst time went into the last decision a store leader could have made on the spot? If the answer involves multiple meetings and a pilot program for something reversible and low-risk, that’s a decision-rights problem, not a data problem.

What does the store manager closest to this decision already know that the data is trying to approximate? Traffic patterns, regular customers, staffing realities. Often, the fastest way to get an accurate answer is to ask the person already living it.

This is what practical leadership for store managers is built on: giving the person with the most context the authority to act on it, instead of routing every judgment call through a process designed for scale, not accuracy.

The bigger point for retail leadership

None of this means centralized decisions are always wrong, or that data collection has no place. It means the cost of centralizing a decision should be weighed against what’s actually gained. Sephora is headed in a reasonable direction. The distance between the effort spent and the two hours delivered is the story worth paying attention to.

Invest in the frontline’s judgment the way you’d invest in any other operational asset, and a lot of the meetings, pilots, and press releases become unnecessary. The floor already knows. The question—is HQ leadership set up to listen to it?

I spent 25 years leading retail teams on the floor. I write and speak about what leadership looks like when it’s built on that reality instead of a dashboard.