Open but unattended shop - a cautionary tale.

[J3K]

Welcome to Good Vibes Surf and Turf. This beautiful beach side shop turns a profit 24/7 while you're off gallivanting around gathering loot and selling it at other shops. We offer a limited menu including cooked catfish, medium-rare steak, baked apples, and water. Max occupancy of 5. Please seat yourself.

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My gatherers are working as expected and depositing catfish, steak, and apples into containers marked for reuse in crafting but not selling. Water is deposited in a container filtered to accept it and marked for selling. I have plenty of raw material.

I have 4 separate kitchen ovens (stoves forget queues open leaving the area) set for employees to craft a different queued item using the raw materials that were collected (2 for catfish). Repeat is flagged on for all of them.

I have a kitchen shelf set up next to the ovens that has filtered deposits to only accept the items I am crafting. The shelf is set to pull items out for sale. This shelf builds stacks of crafted items pending space in the shop to sell them.

All of the above is on employee only tiles.

In the shop itself, I have 3 modern display shelves filtered to only accept the items being crafted, so there will always be space available for the crafted items in the shop. Other employees are prioritizing stocking these shelves from the shelf in the kitchen and cleaning in their spare time. Another modern display shelf is filtered to only sell water.

"Positive" notes (marked with a green carat) include:

• Service was quick!
  
• Great deal!
  
• They were mean
  
• Not bad
  
• I've been looking for this!
  
• Nice Selection!
  
• Tasteful selection of stocks.
  
• Will be coming back. Probably.
  
• Just what I needed!
  
• I found something I liked.
  
• Checkout at a snail's pace.
  
• My patience is being tested.
  
• They completely ignored me.

Negative reviews are few and far between until cleaning becomes an issue.

ignoring special requests doesn't affect rating because I have the policy active that they won't leave a negative review if they don't leave with an item. I added self checkouts to save on employee slots. Capacity is limited to balance with employee efficiency. All 8 of my employees are trained to near 30% for both comfort and energy and working through 12-16 hr shifts. Wages run between $29 and $48 an hour. Shop is 5 stars and rose from level 15 to 20 without my interference stocking or selling a thing.

Margin percentages look enticing due to some policies adding flat cost, and others that add percentages. Items sell for +118% to +675% of base. Actual profits are a different story with water selling for $16-$31, steak for $40-$61, catfish for $72-$93, and apples for $20-$37. I could probably tweak policies a bit more to improve these. I could also just completely ignore the RP factor by selling only gathered blue fish directly to the customer to make significantly more profit per sale. Regardless of policy, profits would/should never reach what could be made by players harvesting and selling their own goods.

Okay, so it all works. Great! Why is this in Feedback / Bug Reports?

Watching self checkout sales shows a discrepancy between what the review says the customer spent and what they actually spent (based on the popup by the register matching the value added to the vault). Some were accurate, but a lot are wildly off. That guy in the suit didn't just pay $618 for that bottle of water the review claimed...

I do not have the rush hour policy enabled, but customers would often still arrive in large waves. 15-20 customers often showed up at once to absolutely trash the plot area. They slowly reduced by being let into the shop or flaking out, but it wasn't a steady stream. There was a short lull between when the last customer in the group was served and a new group arrived so capacity regularly dipped to 0/5. My cleaning staff kept the shop near spotless between stocking actions but could not overcome the plot area mess which eventually led to customer complaints about cleanliness. *edit: To be clear, all the promotions were passed in this shop long before I automated it.

However, all of it was a wasted effort. To alleviate the buildup of trash generated by loitering customers outside a closed shop, customer spawns were disabled entirely while players are away from the shop and don't reactivate until a player is near the open shop. This shop makes zero profit while I'm away. Returning to the lot after half an hour found it devoid of customers and the vault had only been influenced by employee wages. Employees will continue to gather and build up crafted stock, but I need to be at least afk on a rock nearby if I want to generate income.

[nancy.duan]

Thanks for bringing this up, J3K. Logged as 12251. We are also thinking about changing how unattended shops work, and this is helpful feedback!