Purchasing agents....

[Datucis]

I need to start with stating I am very early in the game so I may be outside my realm here. However, I feel the purchasing agents are just money sinks. I need 1 per shipper. I order once in a great while from each one, because a single order will fill my store for a long period of time. The rest of the time these people are just sitting on their hands and I am paying them. I go from 2k+ on the weekends to 400$ on the weekdays because I am paying for 2 purchasing agents for 40h/week and a logistics agents plus driver. The driver an only hit 2 stores, so I am still needing to fill my third store personally.

I just feel having to pay 80 hours a week at 20$+ an hour for someone thats basically not doing a darn thing most of the time is a little silly. 1 agent can easily take care of 2 or more providers seeing as they only have to make a phone call once a week tops.

[Datucis]

forgot i also have to fund a cleaner for that business while half the staff are doing notta.

[petehandsome]

yeah, you're early.
purchasing agents are great. and timing when to start the contract is huge. getting your paper bags for 10c or a sweet deal on clothes. worth keeping an eye on.

[Datucis]

Originally posted by petehandsome:

yeah, you're early.
purchasing agents are great. and timing when to start the contract is huge. getting your paper bags for 10c or a sweet deal on clothes. worth keeping an eye on.

I'm not saying they're useless, just seems a bit crazy I need one for shipper im trying to order from. Right now I have a coffee shop, fast food joint, and gift shop. Even without the gift shop I would still need 2 shippers to technically get all the items i need for my shops. Paper bags only come from the one after all... Since the order has to be 2500$ and my sales of cheap gifts are only about 200 per week. I really can order about 17k paperbags and not need to order from this guy for about 7 weeks since i use about 2500 bags a week. So this agent would basically be sitting on his hands for 7 weeks but still getting paid. Then i have to higher another agents to order all the stuff I need for my coffee shop and fast food joint. Since that requires a 6k min order I have that one sitting on his hands for about 3 or 4 weeks waiting for stock to lower to a point where it makes since to order another 6k worth of stock.

[soldyne]

If you are following Uncle Fred then you are most likely not ready for a HQ let alone purchasing agents. the Tutorial is serviceable but not meant to make you successful. just fire your agents, shut down you HQ and handle it yourself until you are making about 50k a day in profit.

In the early mid game you can just set up deliveries with the distribution warehouse. the delivery fee is 1000 and you can only order 20 boxes, but, they can ship anything to each of your stores with next day delivery. its a good solution until you get to the point where a purchaser makes sense.

yes, the minimum order amount is a bit rough, but, trust me, after about 10 stores you will be ordering $2500 worth of paper bags every day and then that purchaser will be worth the money. This is in addition to tens of thousands of dollars worth of clothing, burgers, and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry.

also, you only ever need 4 purchasing agents...ever. there are only 4 importers at the moment. and you only needs 1 logistics agent per warehouse. With a large truck, and fully trained driver and agent a small warehouse can handle about 7 or 8 locations while a large warehouse can double that. I only have 4 warehouses with 4 purchases and 4 logistics agents and that can handle over 30 businesses. *hint* you can tell a warehouse to delivery products to other warehouses.

[Datucis]

Originally posted by soldyne:

If you are following Uncle Fred then you are most likely not ready for a HQ let alone purchasing agents. the Tutorial is serviceable but not meant to make you successful. just fire your agents, shut down you HQ and handle it yourself until you are making about 50k a day in profit.

In the early mid game you can just set up deliveries with the distribution warehouse. the delivery fee is 1000 and you can only order 20 boxes, but, they can ship anything to each of your stores with next day delivery. its a good solution until you get to the point where a purchaser makes sense.

yes, the minimum order amount is a bit rough, but, trust me, after about 10 stores you will be ordering $2500 worth of paper bags every day and then that purchaser will be worth the money. This is in addition to tens of thousands of dollars worth of clothing, burgers, and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry.

also, you only ever need 4 purchasing agents...ever. there are only 4 importers at the moment. and you only needs 1 logistics agent per warehouse. With a large truck, and fully trained driver and agent a small warehouse can handle about 7 or 8 locations while a large warehouse can double that. I only have 4 warehouses with 4 purchases and 4 logistics agents and that can handle over 30 businesses. *hint* you can tell a warehouse to delivery products to other warehouses.

Awesome thanks for the information. I was expecting to be ordering more as thing went up, but i assumed i would probably order for a full week then at a time. This would allow 1 order per day. However, eh i guess ill just ignore it lol. Didn't know about the delivery driver being able to service more than 2 businesses though. Ill definitely have to upgrade her vehicle.

[Vimpster]

I have been following the campaign on normal difficulty and have gotten to the point of having recently setup a 3rd business as a law firm. So I only have 2 businesses that are retail and thus make use of my HQ and warehouse. But so far, with just a single purchasing agent, a single logistics manager and a single driver, my combined costs for my HQ and warehouse is only around $450.

My 15 capacity gift shop makes over $3000 profit a day and my 30 capacity fast food place makes between $1000-$2000 profit a day, and the 4 capacity law firm is up to $1000 profit with just 3 lawyers. So the overhead costs of the HQ and warehouse are quite insignificant even at this early stage in my case. Both my purchasing agent and logistics manager have wages of around $16-$18 an hour. My driver is, I think, $20 an hour.

[RoofCat]

Originally posted by soldyne:

If you are following Uncle Fred then you are most likely not ready for a HQ let alone purchasing agents. the Tutorial is serviceable but not meant to make you successful. just fire your agents, shut down you HQ and handle it yourself until you are making about 50k a day in profit.

purchase agent saves you ~33% of your resource costs and costs around 300$ a day. Rent for the small office - 100? Another 100$ for small Warehouse? Mind you, you don't need driver or logistics manager as you can just pick it all up. Your resource costs are 1/2..2/3 of your total costs, depending on your management skills, so...

I don't know which math genius told you about 50k threshold, but in my world you would profit from purchase agent at 2k..3k daily profit already

[Sistermatic™]

Originally posted by Datucis:

The driver an only hit 2 stores, so I am still needing to fill my third store personally.

Train your drivers. Once they can drive a truck (>50%), they'll deliver to many more locations.

I go from 2k+ on the weekends to 400$ on the weekdays

This isn't a purchasing agent issue in as much as your stores must be operating very poorly, particularly if you have 3 of them.

eg: Depending on the difficulty level you are on of course, but on easy (sandbox), a single well operated (225m) gift store nets about $25k per day. A clothing store would triple that.

[Kyle]

Originally posted by Sistermatic™:

Originally posted by Datucis:

The driver an only hit 2 stores, so I am still needing to fill my third store personally.

Train your drivers. Once they can drive a truck (>50%), they'll deliver to many more locations.

I go from 2k+ on the weekends to 400$ on the weekdays

This isn't a purchasing agent issue in as much as your stores must be operating very poorly, particularly if you have 3 of them.

eg: Depending on the difficulty level you are on of course, but on easy (sandbox), a single well operated (225m) gift store nets about $25k per day. A clothing store would triple that.

even in hard giftshops can make like 5 or something around there with just primary products on 15 capacity in garment

(anything below here is just replying to random stuff in the thread and not the quoted message)

the tutorial is sufficient to teach you to make a profitable shop that can keep you afloat, but doesn't go into depth on how to automate it or improve it outside of a sketchy 'buy drinks machines, hint hint you can buy more itemtypes' type of way

you can press f1 to see all the products a business type can sell without a penalty (you can sell anything anywhere, but these products sell in higher volume)

product variety is important
it's best to train your purchasing agents to 100% before making the contract via your phone as they get reduced prices and remaking the contracts later is a pain in the ass

[Datucis]

I'm VERY interested in how you are all making so much money. On the play that I originally started this with I was making about 500 a day from the fast food, -100 a day from the coffee shop, and about 2k a day from the gift shop. In fact I have gone through 3 plays and never had anything but my gift shops making 2k a day.

With my current play through I have a fast food joint that makes 158$ a day. This is of course with 100% customer satisfaction and 3 cashier desks. Without the 3 I can't service all the people coming through. Also finding any person that takes less than 21$ an hour on my play throughs has been exceptionally rare. To the point I can put a request for 10 people over 10 days and maybe get 1 person under 21$ an hour in pay.

My gift shops once again have 100% customer satisfaction and bring in 1.8k and 1.3k on my current play through. So how yall are getting these 25k a day figures and such is kinda beyond me. I don't know where I am lacking within my play through to keep me at such a low profit level.

[Daystar]

Check your schedules at your shops at 5 past midnight for weekdays and weekends, and see what hours you are most busy and what hours you are most slow and adjust your schedule accordingly, to get an accurate read of the schedule though you must not enter the business for a full 24 hours I believe, I think it affects the simulation of the business managing itself.