Fun fact: in most of the world, medical personal like pharmacists can't go on strike.
The majority of what a pharmacy provides is repeat customers anyway. Despite regular customers planning badly pretty much all the time, the majority gets their medicine for a minimum of various weeks.
The participation of the strike in Netherlands wasn't high. It was pretty last minute idea by one frustrated worker. The reason was the increase in the aggression towards the people working in a pharmacy.
Source: I know someone working in a pharmacy.
What kind of aggression?
Similar with doctors in hospitals, as long as emergency service works fine strike is allowed.
You incorrectly assume their primary goal is to provide service to customers.
Their primary goal is to maximize profits, and in a saturated market the only way to do that is by trying to take market share from the competition.
If being open at 2am provides 1$ an hour of profit, that’s still profit.
It's probably an oversimplification but it is painfully evident when walking around metro areas of Japan.
The first ice cream vendor sets up in the center of the boardwalk, to minimize walking distance to all available customers. The second vendor sets up immediately adjacent, to take half the customers, who will stop at the nearest cart instead of walking another 2m. The third vendor, sets up on the opposite side from the 2nd, and then the first loses all their customers. So the first relocates to the other side of the 2nd, and they lose all their customers. Then the 2nd relocates to the other side of the 3rd.
The vendors should really cartelize, divide up exclusive territories, and collude to drive out newer competitors. But whenever the cartel breaks down, or none is active, the individual vendors are constantly trying to cut each others' throats by taking market share from the others. Each ice cream vendor cart needs a certain length of boardwalk territory to remain in business, so any two colluding vendors could force another to move by bracketing the target on either side. The game gets increasingly complex as you add more players, and more so when adding a second dimension, such that the vendors have a territory area, rather than a length.
Secoma is pursuing a strategy of claiming territories too small to support a greedier store, such that 7-11 can't carve away pieces of it without destroying itself and making no gains, whereas 7-11 is pursuing a strategy of sacrificing some of its stores to destroy all of its competitor stores, so that the survivors can divide the secured territories amongst themselves.
The game is like Go, but in real life. Instead of a grid on a board, the moves are putting a franchise store location down on a map. Pieces that are surrounded are removed. Scoring is by profit rather than by territory.
[0] In the qualifying round of Price is Right, 4 contestants try to guess the retail price of an advertised product, as closely as possible, without bidding greater than the actual retail price. The winner is then allowed to play one of the prize-awarding games.
There were way too many convenience stores that were open in the middle of the night, though (and apparently this is a requirement on the franchisees). There was a 24/7 convenience store on the first floor of my hotel, and then another one down the block, and then several more within a two block radius. There's no reason they couldn't all coordinate better so that each individual store is only open through the night a couple times per week. That would make a lot more sense. Most customers would still be able to reach an open convenience store, even in the middle of the night, within a few blocks walk. It'd be nice if stores had posted the hours of nearby stores so you'd know where else to go if the one you wanted was closed, but that's probably unnecessary now in the age of apps (I had no problem finding opening times for places on Google Maps).