Before the Dashboard
What the sari-sari store already knew about operations.
If you live in any town in the Philippines… kahit nga sa di siyudad eh, there’s usually a sari-sari store somewhere nearby.
Sometimes it is part of a house. A little window with metal bars, sachets hanging from strings like bunting, biscuits and candy in the clear plastic containers, canned goods stacked wherever they fit, soft drinks in a ref (fridge) that’s probably been opened seventeen times in the last hour.
Nothing remarkable.
It is just there.
And I think that is exactly why we don’t notice how much is happening inside one.
Because call it a sari-sari store and it sounds ordinary. Call it a micro-retail operation managing inventory, working capital, demand, suppliers, credit, pricing, fulfillment, and last-mile distribution...
Well.
Now somebody is going to make a PowerPoint about it. Hahah. Charots kay akong drama diba?
But it is true.
The Philippine Statistics Authority literally files sari-sari stores under their own retail subclass. 47113. “Retail selling in sari-sari stores.” Sitting right there between the supermarket and the convenience store, with a number of its own. And DTI counts more than 1.3 million of them across the country. DTI’s own digitalization push covers digital payments, e-commerce, inventory management, operational efficiency.
Operations.
What if I tell you there’s more to learn about operations when you watch sari-sari stores? That sari-sari store owners have actually been doing operations long before anyone tried to teach them the word? Would you agree? Or… a-agree ka na lang kasi bagot ka na makipag-debate with me?
Think about inventory.
A small store cannot stock everything. There isn’t enough space, there isn’t enough capital, and there is no point holding ten boxes of something nobody on your street actually buys.
So the assortment becomes local. Not theoretically local. Actually… local.
What sells near an elementary school is not what sells beside a terminal.
What moves in summer changes when classes start.
What people buy on payday is not what they buy when payday is still three days away and everybody is stretching whatever is left in the wallet.
And the store adjusts.
More of this. Less of that.
That one keeps getting asked for, so maybe stock it next time.
That one has been sitting there forever.
Ayaw na ana.
Demand forecasting. Except nobody is calling it demand forecasting.
Fascinating, diba?
And then there is tingi.
You don’t need the whole bottle. You need enough shampoo for today. You don’t need a box - just two pieces.
You don’t need the most efficient unit price according to somebody’s Excel sheet. You need the quantity your money can buy right now.
There is an operations lesson buried in that, and I think the big organizations forget it all the time: efficiency depends on whose problem you are solving.
Buying in bulk is cheaper.
But cheaper is useless if the person standing at the counter cannot afford the bulk.
So the store breaks the supply down until it matches the reality in front of it.
Small quantities.
Small transactions.
Small margins.
Again and again and again.
That is not inefficiency.
That is fulfillment designed around a constraint.
And then you reach the part no dashboard handles quite as cleanly.
People.
The suki. We talked about it before, remember? The neighbor who buys the same thing every morning. The kid sent out because somebody forgot the cooking oil again. The one who asks, quietly, if they can pay later.
Utang. (Uyyyyyy, ganda na topic, maybe next week!)
And just like that, this tiny operation is managing credit risk.
And yes, sari-sari stores are not perfect.
They’re what corporate people would say… not scalable. But it is data. Human data.
And this, I think, is where the sari-sari store gets more interesting than just being called a small business.
A 2025 PIDS study on the women who run them found that the money was the fragile part. Income they weren’t sure would last, mostly folded right back into the store or the household. What held was everything around it. Family support. Social connectedness. Community participation. A role the study puts inside the country’s care economy.
Which makes sense.
Because the store lives inside the community it serves. There is almost no distance between operations and customer. The customer is right there. Sometimes literally shouting from outside.
And big companies spend millions trying to rebuild that closeness with customer profiles, behavior analytics, forecasting engines, loyalty programs, CRM, real-time inventory.
I work in operations. I am not about to start throwing rocks at dashboards. I like my systems running, thank you very much.
But sometimes I think formal operations tricks us into believing the system only exists once we have documented it.
As if a process becomes a process the moment somebody draws boxes and arrows around it. As if demand becomes demand only when it shows up on a report. As if knowing your customer becomes real only after it lives inside software.
Meanwhile, somewhere in a barangay, a tiny barrio, somebody already knows which products will be gone before dinner.
ADB Ventures backed a company called Packworks that gives sari-sari stores point-of-sale, inventory management, and online procurement, and gives suppliers real-time visibility into what is actually moving through the last mile of the supply chain.
And I like that.
Because the lesson should never be that sari-sari stores don’t need better systems since Filipino ingenuity will figure it out anyway.
Fuck that.
We romanticize diskarte too much.
People deserve better tools. Better access to capital, better information, easier procurement, less risk, less manual work. PIDS itself names the same walls over and over: limited capital, gaps in business skills, too little engagement with the government support that is supposed to be there for them.
The point is not to preserve the difficulty because difficulty looks culturally authentic.
The point is that when the tools finally arrive, they are not arriving to build a system out of nothing.
They are arriving to support one that was already there.
A system built out of repetition, proximity, memory, adjustment, relationships. Knowing what moved yesterday and what will probably move tomorrow.
Less sophisticated on paper, maybe.
Messier, maybe.
Maybe the notebook has three different handwritings in it because whoever happened to be watching the store that day is who wrote in it.
But still a system.
And maybe that is what I keep coming back to, every time I think about operations here, in this country, with our own hands.
We were operating things long before we had the language the companies now use to describe them.
We were forecasting. Allocating. Adjusting. Finding the bottleneck, working around the constraint, getting the thing from here to there with whatever time and money and space and people we had.
The dashboard came later.
The system was already there.
So ayan na. May pa-ops na naman tayo, this time sa tabi ng isang sari-sari store. Char lang!
Thoughts from my seat in my barrio, and while battling seasonal depression brought on by the rain. I’m Mona. Your Bisaya OBM who writes.
P.S. Ano ang sistema mo na matagal nang umaandar bago mo pa ito naisulat? What system have you been running long before anyone wrote it down?
