You know what your labour costs. You don't know what your tasks cost.

You know what your labour costs. You don't know what your tasks cost.

One store's week, in numbers the retailer worked out for himself.

170 hours a week of rostered labour. 110 of them on sales.

Sixty of them on administrative tasks.

Nobody designed that split. Nobody approved it at a board meeting. It was discovered, by someone who went looking, in a business that had been running that way for years.

An operator in a completely different category, separately, arrived at the same shape:

"I worked out yesterday, 60% of their hours, 60% of their 38 hours, are administrational tasks."

Here's the uncomfortable pair of sentences. You can tell me to the cent what your wage bill was last week. You cannot tell me what any single thing you asked a store to do cost you to have done.

Both of those are true in almost every retail business. Only one of them should be.

You have visibility of hours. You have none of what happens inside them.

An executive at a specialty retailer put it precisely:

"We have a visibility of hours, but not truly what happens in those hours… In the core hours, which are 80% or more of the hours: what are really the tasks? It is a black box from my point of view."

That black box isn't a failure of anyone's systems. Rostering and time-and-attendance software has become genuinely good. It will tell you who was there, when they arrived, what they were paid and whether they took their break.

It was never designed to tell you what the hours were spent on. And nobody ever built the layer that does.

So the business ends up with two numbers that should be related and aren't: a precise cost, and a complete unknown about what that cost purchased.

The support office estimates. The store knows. The gap is the whole problem.

The best sentence anyone offered on this came from an operator at a furniture retailer:

"There's a huge difference between the support office person thinking how long it takes, to a retail person knowing how long it took."

Most retailers have both numbers in their business. They just never meet. The estimate lives in the head of whoever wrote the directive. The real figure lives with whoever did the work, and it stays there, because nothing ever asks.

An operations manager at an apparel group described the consequence: "you don't actually know exactly how long it takes them on average to do that thing." No baseline. So no forecast. So no grounds to push back when someone wants to add one more thing to next week.

Where the number does get collected, the method is heroic and fragile. Same furniture retailer:

"Today it's a very manual process. It's them emailing a human being, and that person copy-pastes that into an Excel spreadsheet."

And there's a blindness dimension that store teams feel acutely. One operator on the people writing the tasks:

"a lot of the people that create the tasks don't understand storeland… they'll write them and present them in a way that's like, have you ever been in a store?"

Work that isn't in the labour model still gets done. Usually badly.

The sharpest example came from a visual merchandising lead at a liquor retailer with around 280 stores.

"There are no hours set aside for visual merchandising… Did they factor in the time it takes to stand up and put that poster up for the 20 aisle ends that I might have? No."

So what does she do when she needs something done?

"Sometimes if I want them to do an extra VM task, I have to look at my VM budget and pay the stores… times that by 280 stores to get something done."

Read that again. A head office function is buying labour from its own stores, out of a marketing budget, because the work she is accountable for has no hours attached to it anywhere in the labour model. Her own estimate for flipping a store (signage alone) is at least two hours.

The general rule underneath it: work with no hours allocated to it does not disappear. It gets done badly, or done instead of selling, or bought back later at a worse price than if it had been planned.

Store fulfilment is the same story at larger scale. Picking and packing online orders is real labour that arrives in the morning and keeps arriving all day, and in plenty of businesses it sits nowhere in the store's labour model at all.

Nobody can see the total load before it lands

This is where costing stops being a measurement exercise and becomes a design one.

"People don't have any visibility of how many tasks a store has to do. So if a buyer is buying a new product and that's due to land on a particular day, they would have no visibility that there's a particular sales campaign about to be launched in the store. So your product isn't going to get launched."

The structural cause was described by another operator with obvious frustration:

"This squad's doing amazing work and they're going to just push that into store. And then we've got another area over here doing amazing work. We're just going to push that into store. And it's like, okay, well, that doesn't make sense."

Every one of those teams is doing good work. Nobody is behaving badly. There's simply no place where the total lands before it lands on a store, and the collisions are predictable once you look: 400 boxes of stock in week one of a range month, in a month that also holds a major trade event. Heavy operations and heavy trade, in the same fortnight, planned by different people.

One operator's fix is a rule rather than a system, and it works because she can defend it:

"Product will come to me and say, hey, we need this turned around in five days. I'm like, no, absolutely not. Ten days is the minimum time we're going to give the team."

That's a gatekeeping decision. It's far easier to defend when you know what the thing costs.

Costing a task changes what you send, and when

Two numbers, together.

Cost per executed task = measured time on task × loaded hourly rate, aggregated across the stores that did it.

Sales per labour hour = sales ÷ rostered hours.

One tells you what the hour was spent on. The other tells you what the hour earned. Neither is much use alone; together they answer the question that matters most, which is whether this was the best available use of that hour in that store.

Sales per labour hour isn't theoretical, incidentally. It's live as a store-level KPI in multiple retailers, with targets in the range of $350 to $450 depending on the role.

Three things change once you can do this. Timing: a task run in peak trade has a sales cost that the same task run at 9am does not. Worth: "should we do this in every store" becomes a question with an answer, rather than a matter of seniority. And removal, which is the one that matters most.

A word of caution on method: cost tasks at role or store level, not at the level of the individual. One operator raised the confidentiality problem directly: per-task costing at individual level makes pay rates inferable by colleagues. It's a real issue and it's easily avoided by averaging.

Don't assume one task, one person, either. As one operator put it, "rarely is it an isolated task that sits solely with me that no one else comes and supports in." A costing model that assumes a single owner per task will be dismissed by most people who have actually run a store.

Cutting hours without task data is guessing with a percentage

There's real pressure behind this, and it's worth being honest about. One operator's numbers: wages up around 4.75%, rents up 3.5 to 4%, wages and occupancy together roughly 30% of the business. His conclusion: "there will be a moment in which you just need to keep up with the sales, because there is nothing else left in the bone."

So the percentage cut arrives. And the same operator's response to it:

"We said we need to cut 2% or 3% or whatever, because we have to… No. But are we really doing it correctly?"

A flat cut can only be applied to the hours you can see. It removes hours without touching the work, which means the same load lands on fewer people. The work is the thing you actually wanted to reduce.

There's waste to find, too, and it isn't where the folklore says. The same operator: "I still go to some stores and maybe at 10am there is two or three people and there is no two or three customers at all." Along with the assumption worth killing: "there is this historic thought that oh, 12 to 3 is your busiest time in a store, that's when you should be on the floor."

And a saving doesn't have to be banked. One operator's stated intention was the opposite: "you can bank the cost efficiency savings, or potentially we readdress those into operative hours, how do we improve conversion."

The short version

The most useful thing anyone said about this came from a customer, redirecting his own programme mid-conversation:

"Although the sponsor is really keen to understand what takes time, I'm more keen to understand what we take away to make that list smaller and easier."

Costing the work is not an exercise in finding out who is slow. It's how you build the case for not sending something. That's the version store teams are most likely to accept, and the one that makes next year easier rather than just tighter.

Frequently asked questions

How long does a store task actually take? Very few retailers can say, and that's the problem. The estimate lives in the support office; the real number lives with whoever did the work. The reliable method is measuring completion time in the field, across enough stores to get a stable average, then using that average as your planning figure.

How do I work out what a task costs? Measured time on task, multiplied by the loaded hourly rate of whoever did it, summed across the stores that did it. Without measured time you're multiplying a guess by a wage.

How much of a store manager's week is admin? Retailers who have measured it land between a third and a half. One found 60 of 170 rostered hours a week were administrative. Another, independently and in a different category, found 60% of a 38-hour week.

What is sales per labour hour, and should we use it? Sales divided by rostered hours. It's live as a store KPI in several Australian and New Zealand retailers, with targets around $350 to $450 depending on role. It pairs well with task cost: one tells you what the hour earned, the other what it was spent on.

Won't measuring task time just get used to cut hours? That's the assumption store teams make, and it's why some retailers reject the whole framing. The more valuable use is removal: knowing what a task costs is how you justify not sending it. One customer asked for exactly that reframe: less interest in what takes time, more in what could be taken away.

Every quote in this piece comes from a recorded conversation with a retail operator. Names, brands and identifying details have been removed.