What If Everything We Know About Retail Growth Is Wrong?

By Tam Goldsmith

What if the future of franchising isn't bigger stores, but stores that are simply closer to the customer?

For decades, retailers believed bigger was always better. Bigger stores, bigger car parks and bigger product ranges became the blueprint for success. Then consumers quietly rewrote the rules, and one Polish franchise may have spotted the shift before almost anyone else.

For years, the franchise industry chased scale in the most obvious way possible. If a store was successful, the answer seemed simple: make the next one bigger. More shelves, more products, more parking and more floor space were seen as the natural signs of progress. Customers would drive further because you offered more choice, and bigger stores became a symbol of bigger ambitions.

I'm beginning to think that assumption is becoming one of retail's biggest blind spots.

The way people shop today isn't the way they shopped twenty years ago. Life feels busier, journeys are shorter and convenience has become a currency in its own right. People still make the big supermarket trip, but they're also stopping for milk on the way home, grabbing lunch between meetings, picking up dinner ingredients after work or buying something they've forgotten five minutes before guests arrive. Increasingly, they're paying for speed rather than selection, and that's creating opportunities for businesses that understand one very simple truth: being close to the customer can matter more than being the biggest player in town.

That's exactly why I think Żabka deserves far more attention than it gets outside Europe.

At first glance, there's nothing particularly glamorous about the business. It's a convenience store chain, and most people probably wouldn't expect a convenience store to offer lessons that apply across the franchise industry. But spend a little time looking beneath the surface and a very different picture emerges. Żabka has built a network of more than 11,000 neighbourhood stores across Poland, not by trying to compete with supermarkets on size, but by becoming part of people's everyday routines. The stores are deliberately small, easy to access and positioned where customers already live, work and travel.

That isn't just a retail strategy. It's a behavioural strategy.

The more I looked into the business, the more I found myself thinking that Żabka isn't really selling groceries at all. What it's selling is time. Every visit saves a customer a longer journey, a queue in a larger supermarket or the frustration of making an extra trip across town. That's a value proposition many businesses overlook because it's much harder to measure than square metres or basket size. Yet if you ask most consumers what they want more of, the answer probably isn't another aisle of products. It's another ten minutes in their day.

There's a lesson there for almost every franchise sector.

We've spent years telling ourselves that growth means adding more. More locations, more menu items, more services, more products and larger premises. Sometimes that's absolutely the right decision, but it's worth asking whether we've become a little obsessed with size while quietly ignoring convenience. Some would argue the brands winning today aren't necessarily offering customers more. They're asking customers to do less. Less travelling, less waiting and less effort. That's a subtle difference, but commercially it's a powerful one.

You can already see that thinking spreading well beyond convenience retail. Coffee brands are opening compact neighbourhood locations instead of destination cafés. Healthcare providers are moving into residential communities rather than expecting patients to travel. Fitness operators are experimenting with smaller local studios that fit naturally into daily life. Even restaurant franchises are investing more heavily in delivery kitchens and collection points because they know proximity increasingly influences purchasing decisions.

Żabka happens to illustrate that trend particularly well because it has built an entire franchise system around it.

Of course, this isn't an argument that supermarkets or large-format retail are somehow finished. That would be far too simplistic. Large stores still offer unbeatable choice, pricing power and the efficiency of completing a week's shopping in one visit. They aren't disappearing any time soon, and supporters of that model would rightly point to the economies of scale they continue to enjoy. The point isn't that one format wins and the other loses. It's that consumer expectations have become more nuanced, and successful franchise systems are adapting accordingly.

What I find fascinating is that many franchise operators are still planning for the market that existed yesterday rather than the one that's emerging today. They continue asking how they can build bigger businesses, when perhaps the more important question is how they can become more accessible. In a world where convenience increasingly shapes purchasing decisions, the franchise that's closest to the customer may ultimately have a greater advantage than the franchise with the biggest premises.

Maybe that's why Żabka has become one of Europe's most compelling franchise success stories. Not because it reinvented retail, but because it recognised something many others overlooked. Consumers weren't asking for more products. They were asking for less friction.

Sometimes the biggest competitive advantage isn't having the biggest store.

It's simply being the one that's around the corner.