Shopkeeping Sims (Shop-Retail Simulations) General Discussion

[Zed Clampet]

This thread serves two purposes. One, it prevents people in the general game discussion thread from happening upon my really boring shop posts. Two, these are somewhat popular these days, so maybe someone new will find this thread and join in.

So if you have anything at all shop sim related to discuss, go right ahead! We are almost always very friendly here, so no need for the normal reticence one might normally feel when posting on a new forum! If there is one poster here to fear, that would be me, and I'm making the solemn promise to be on my best behavior 🙂

 

[Zed Clampet]

So I love these games, but one thing that kind of annoys me that I'm finding applies to just about all of the shop games is that you get penalized when adding low profit margin items to sell. A couple of examples (out of many I could provide):

Bookshop Simulator: Now, it's been awhile since I played this, so it might have changed, but originally, selling used books just absolutely killed your profits. They were easily the most popular item in the store, and you actually lost money on them. Once you have found the proper bonus books to use, getting rid of the used books was the right move.

Bookshop Simulator on Steam

Open your own bookshop! Order books, stock your shelves, and earn revenue. Use your profits to decorate, expand, and hire staff. Collect rare books that give powerful abilities. Adopt a cat to keep you and your customers company along the way!

store.steampowered.com

Megastore Simulator: This is what I'm currently playing. I was making about $4200 a day, decided to unlock groceries (which are very cheap) and that dropped to $3500 a day.

Megastore Simulator on Steam

Megastore Simulator is a first-person management & tycoon game. Start small and grow into a massive two-floor megastore with forklifts, pallet jacks, and staff. Unlock and manage departments like Bakery, Clothing, Electronics, Sports, Music, Toys, Grocery, Seafood, and Vending Machines

store.steampowered.com

Despite both of those games are very good for anyone looking for a new shop sim.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I don't think I completely explained this right. It would make sense that adding low margin items that are similar to what you already sell would cut into your profits in a strict retail sim, but there are no strict retail sims, and in a gamified world, you shouldn't do worse for adding new things. In the bookshop example, you might, in the real world, lose some profits if customers come in and either find what they were looking for in the used book section or decide to see if they can save some money and find something they'll be happy with that is used, so that's probably not the best example, but If I'm running a pharmacy, and all we sell are prescriptions, and then I add greeting cards, we should still get the same amount of pharmacy business, plus now we might get some greeting card business on top, and that's the way it should work in games even if you are adding a similar item to what you already have. Now if someone makes a real retail simulation, that might be different depending on your product offering.

 

[Pifanjr]

I don't think I completely explained this right. It would make sense that adding low margin items that are similar to what you already sell would cut into your profits in a strict retail sim, but there are no strict retail sims, and in a gamified world, you shouldn't do worse for adding new things. In the bookshop example, you might, in the real world, lose some profits if customers come in and either find what they were looking for in the used book section or decide to see if they can save some money and find something they'll be happy with that is used, so that's probably not the best example, but If I'm running a pharmacy, and all we sell are prescriptions, and then I add greeting cards, we should still get the same amount of pharmacy business, plus now we might get some greeting card business on top, and that's the way it should work in games even if you are adding a similar item to what you already have. Now if someone makes a real retail simulation, that might be different depending on your product offering.

I suspect a lot of shop sims have the customers just pick a couple of random products from the store to buy. So if you add a bunch of low margin items your high margin items get picked less often.

To have a proper shop sim I would suspect you'd need to have other shops around as well, with customers choosing which shop(s) to go to based on their various needs, the distance to a shop and the price of the items at each shop, plus stuff like how nice a shop looks and how long the lines are. You should be able to draw in customers by having a loss leader that convinces some customers to come to your store and buy other things there as well.

As far as I know however more store sims don't bother with simulating an entire market, your store typically exists in a void.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I suspect a lot of shop sims have the customers just pick a couple of random products from the store to buy. So if you add a bunch of low margin items your high margin items get picked less often.

To have a proper shop sim I would suspect you'd need to have other shops around as well, with customers choosing which shop(s) to go to based on their various needs, the distance to a shop and the price of the items at each shop, plus stuff like how nice a shop looks and how long the lines are. You should be able to draw in customers by having a loss leader that convinces some customers to come to your store and buy other things there as well.

As far as I know however more store sims don't bother with simulating an entire market, your store typically exists in a void.

Big Ambitions does what you are talking about with competition, lines, decorations, etc. I never think of Big Ambitions as a retail sim because there is so much more to it. For instance, just on getting products to sell, you can buy them locally from one of the wholesalers, who all have different prices; you can use one of the importers (you have buyers who handle imports for you if you want them to) and you can also start manufacturing your own products (you actually have to get the raw materials, buy a building and set up manufacturing kind of like Factorio). You can also do things like buy a Broadway theater and put on shows, buy New York properties and rent the rooms. It goes on an on. Running nightclubs is pretty fun.

One thing I would like to see that no one at all does is merchandising. In real life, how and where you put your products is extremely important. Walmart, for instance, puts every day need items like milk and toilet paper far from the entrance so that people have to wander past a lot of product displays to get them. There is quite a bit of stuff like that that no one simulates.

 

[Colif]

Bookshop simulator... ugh, which version of Dewey do you use?
How are the books organised?
This is a classic... I was shown it when I did my Library diploma

I spent enough time in actual Video stores to be able to resist this... even have a Video Ezy keyring from all those years ago

Retro Rewind - Video Store Simulator on Steam

Manage your very own video store in the early 90s! Rent, sell, decorate and expand your business from the ground up and relive the golden ages of video rentals!

store.steampowered.com

 

[Zed Clampet]

Bookshop simulator... ugh, which version of Dewey do you use?
How are the books organised?
This is a classic... I was shown it when I did my Library diploma

I spent enough time in actual Video stores to be able to resist this... even have a Video Ezy keyring from all those years ago

Retro Rewind - Video Store Simulator on Steam

Manage your very own video store in the early 90s! Rent, sell, decorate and expand your business from the ground up and relive the golden ages of video rentals!

store.steampowered.com

Great video. I used to work at the university's law library when I was a student. Also, at a mental hospital, but I'm still trying to get over that 🤣

What kind of crazy bookstores do you have in Australia that follow the Dewey system? In this game, you can organize them however you want, but it also has special shelves for each genre if you want to use them.

The video store game is kind of cool.

 

[Colif]

I think they sorted in genre, probably alpha order.
I don't think many would use Dewey outside of libraries.

Dewey not hard, there are just some tricky rules from memory. I could be thinking of something else.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I think they sorted in genre, probably alpha order.
I don't think many would use Dewey outside of libraries.

Dewey not hard, there are just some tricky rules from memory. I could be thinking of something else.

We used Dewey, but I don't really remember it. Some nights I worked the front desk, and some nights I worked putting returned books, or books left on tables or wherever, back where they belonged. Occasionally, and this was my least favorite, I had to perform audits and make sure that every book was in its right place. It was a 4 story library. Talk about tedious. But if a customer decides to be "helpful" and puts a book in the wrong place, it's essentially lost forever unless you do an audit and find it.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I feel compelled to note, while we are talking about libraries, that this might have been my favorite job of all time. For years afterward, working stressful jobs, I would often have dreams where I worked in a quiet, peaceful library. I would probably come out of retirement right now if I could work in a library.

 

[Colif]

I would often have dreams where I worked in a quiet, peaceful library. I would probably come out of retirement right now if I could work in a library.

That is the reason I wanted to work in one too, until I started my Library Assistant training and discovered that is the historical image of a library, not the actual reality of modern libraries where its mostly all digital and most of the books are in online databases where you print out portions of the books.
Small town libraries may be different and its been about 10 years since I went to a local one (since the course I did ended in 2016).
Digital records means less floor space is needed.

I do live in capital which means we do have the National Library here. You can't borrow from them, but they do have a copy of every publication made in Australia... in a lot of storage areas around country. They measure their collection in kilometres.

Home | National Library of Australia (NLA)

www.library.gov.au

I love their windows... always have

Early mornings are pretty special thanks to stained-glass wonders

The National Library is one of Canberra's most recognisable buildings, thanks in no small part to its stained-glass windows which are a kaleidoscope of colour.

www.abc.net.au

 

[Zed Clampet]

That is the reason I wanted to work in one too, until I started my Library Assistant training and discovered that is the historical image of a library, not the actual reality of modern libraries where its mostly all digital and most of the books are in online databases where you print out portions of the books.
Small town libraries may be different and its been about 10 years since I went to a local one (since the course I did ended in 2016).
Digital records means less floor space is needed.

I do live in capital which means we do have the National Library here. You can't borrow from them, but they do have a copy of every publication made in Australia... in a lot of storage areas around country. They measure their collection in kilometres.

Home | National Library of Australia (NLA)

www.library.gov.au

I love their windows... always have

Early mornings are pretty special thanks to stained-glass wonders

The National Library is one of Canberra's most recognisable buildings, thanks in no small part to its stained-glass windows which are a kaleidoscope of colour.

www.abc.net.au

It was still true when I was working there in the early 90s.

We have two reasonably large libraries, the main University of Tennessee library which is open to the public 24 hours a day:

and the law library:

The school also has specialized libraries for agricultural medicine, music, and architecture

The city has a fairly small main library downtown and about 20 smaller satellite libraries scattered around town:

It's about an 8 hour drive for me to our national library, The Library of Congress. It is pretty cool. You can see the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence there, as well as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the Gutenberg Bible, etc. It has a large selection of real documents, books, as well as 181 million digital items constituting 21 petabytes of data (just looked it up).

If your national library is in Canberra, I think the city I live in is actually bigger based on asking Google, but I'm confused about how Australia does things, so I could be off.

The more that I read about this, I think our libraries are still book-based. Of course, you can connect to the national collection of digital items, too. It's been a long time since I've actually been in a library.

 

[Colif]

It was still true when I was working there in the early 90s.

So 30 years ago? That was when i remember libraries how you imagined. Things have changed in that time. As I said, maybe not in small libraries but its the info age, people don't have time for books now.

We only have about 500k people here, its grown a lot since I was a kid. City is only 120 years old and didn't grow much until the 1960's

 

[Zed Clampet]

So 30 years ago? That was when i remember libraries how you imagined. Things have changed in that time. As I said, maybe not in small libraries but its the info age, people don't have time for books now.

We only have about 500k people here, its grown a lot since I was a kid. City is only 120 years old and didn't grow much until the 1960's

Back then, the law library had one digital service, which seemed a little like magic at the time, but it was outrageously expensive to use. It was targeted at law firms.