Many retailers have been operating in mediocrity for decades. Their focus on minimizing labor costs has led to bad jobs, high employee turnover, and unreliable attendance. This labor instability — combined with out-of-touch decisions from the silos at headquarters — leads to poorly run stores. There are too many products, pilots, tools, and changes. Employees have little to no empowerment. Store managers are too busy fighting fires to develop staff and really manage the business. Not surprisingly, stores are full of operational problems and deliver a poor customer experience. Everyone is frustrated. But if companies cannot quantify both the true costs of this mediocrity and the potential financial gains of building a better system, too few will be convinced they need to prioritize fixing what is broken. In this article, we describe a method for making this calculation.