From Planograms to Real-World Execution: What Walgreens Got Right and What Store Planning Demands Now
Store planning used to be about fitting products into space. Today, it’s about ensuring what gets planned actually shows up in-store, consistently and at scale.
How Store Planning Has Evolved
At Walgreens’ scale, serving 9 million daily customers across 9,000 locations, store planning is a massively complex operation. Each location requires careful decisions about product, placement, and customer behavior.
Assortment planning alone is a huge challenge. In fact, according to Caroline Liu, Senior Director of Strategy, Insights, and Operations for Walgreens Advertising Group, “We are actively leveraging data based on 100 million plus loyalty customers, down to the SKU level.”
“If you think about the scale and granularity of that data, we’re able to understand things like the customer response to assortment decisions; even things like what customers are gravitating towards.”
This massive volume of customer data determines the right assortment for each location, balancing what customers want with what stores can support.
“It’s not an easy problem to solve,” said Tracy Allen, Senior Director of Space Management at Walgreens. “There are so many points of data to absorb to make sure we’re responding to what the customer is telling us.”
What once required a handful of inputs now involves dozens of variables, from weather and local events to billions of transactions. At this scale, manual planning is no longer viable.
“There are so many different ways in which that data can be central to the strategies that you’re building,” according to Liu. “It feels like the only way you can build a truly customer-centric organization is by basing those strategies on your actual customers and the data behind them.”
Creating and executing customer-centric plans consistently across thousands of locations is one of the most complex challenges in retail.
Automation is no longer optional. It’s foundational: “We consistently have to make decisions within every single planogram, and there are thousands of planograms,” said Allen. “Automation is the way forward.”
Store Complexity Was Still Increasing
What made store planning for Walgreens even more challenging was how quickly the physical store itself was changing. In 2020, the pharmaceutical giant introduced partnerships like Kroger Express, in-store healthcare services, and fulfillment and package pickup areas for FedEx.
Each new addition reshaped how space needed to be used and forced planners to rethink how stores functioned day to day. What was once a stable retail environment is now dynamic, constantly evolving, and increasingly difficult to standardize.
As Allen put it: “What we do day in and day out is never static. We’re always asking ourselves, ‘Is there a better way? Can we do something differently?”
That mindset of continuous iteration and constant improvement is no longer optional. It’s required to keep up with shifting customer expectations and operational complexity.
Now: Data and Automation Have Become Essential
As complexity increased, so did the need for more advanced tools and systems. Allen emphasized the importance of:
- Leveraging customer data to guide assortment optimization
- Using automation to reduce manual work
- Adopting technology to respond to demand faster
“We’re always pushing the need for technology,” she said. “If anything, we’re going to put our foot on the gas even more.”
Allen correctly predicted that store planning would become a data-driven discipline that required speed, adaptability, and continuous optimization. She also anticipated one of the biggest shifts shaping retail today: The rise of AI and automation.
“The biggest change will be AI and machine learning,” she said. “Being able to analyze our data quickly will be essential to understand what’s changing and where we need to adapt.”
What was emerging then is now a baseline requirement. Retailers can no longer rely on manual processes or delayed insights. They need real-time visibility, faster decision-making, and the ability to adapt at scale.
2026 Reflection: What Walgreens Got Right — and What’s Changed Since
Looking back, many of the challenges Allen described were early signals of where retail was heading: The shift toward automation, the growing importance of data, and the increasing complexity of store environments.
What’s changed since then is the scale — and the expectation.
Retail today is more dynamic, more localized, and more demanding. Stores vary widely in layout, fixtures, assortments, inventory, and staffing, making consistency across locations significantly harder to achieve.
At the same time, leadership expects faster execution and measurable results, while customers expect seamless, consistent experiences every time they walk into a store.
This shift has fundamentally redefined the role of store planning.
It’s no longer enough to design the right campaign or planogram. The challenge now is ensuring those plans hold up across every location, every format, and every moment. That means:
- Adapting plans to real-world store constraints
- Simplifying execution for store teams
- Validating what actually happens in-store
Without it, even the best plans fail to deliver results.
Store planning is no longer about what should happen; it’s about what actually does. It’s ensuring that the plan translates into consistent execution and measurable outcomes at every location.
Retailers that succeed, like Walgreens, are those that can close that loop, ensuring the experience they design shows up accurately and consistently across the network.
What This Means for Store Planning Teams
As a result, the role of store planning has evolved dramatically. It still requires strong analytical thinking, data fluency, and a deep understanding of store environments, but today, that’s only the starting point. Modern store planning teams must also be able to:
- Scale decisions across thousands of locations
- Adapt quickly as store formats and strategies change
- Connect planning directly to execution outcomes
The work no longer ends at the planogram. It extends into execution, measurement, and continuous optimization.
The Bottom Line
Walgreens saw early that store planning needed to evolve. What was once a manual, static process is now dynamic, data-driven, and deeply connected to store execution.
The biggest shift isn’t technological; it’s conceptual.
In retail, the brand isn’t what gets planned; it’s what the customer actually experiences, and that experience only exists when planning, execution, and reality are fully aligned.
Manual planograms weren’t built for today’s retail complexity. Download Dynamic Planograms: The Missing Link Between Planning and Execution to see how leading retailers ensure what’s planned actually shows up in-store.