[Suggestion] Adjust some profit margins

[Knottypine]

While progression is meant to be somewhat slow, some profit margins seem unbalanced and could effect later game mechanics.

For example, on a bottle of Whiskey, my profit is ~$5 per bottle. And the profit for Wine can be upwards of about ~$16 per bottle. The thing is, the cost amount of Whiskey is fairly expensive, and it has a very small profit margin. Fast forward to later in the game when the player wants to introduce a sale of say 20% off, a bottle I sell for $25 I'm now selling for about $20 at the sale price. So that $5 profit per bottle turns into $0 profit per bottle during the sale.

That's not how supermarkets generally work. The markup on groceries is quite high, and a store IRL can mark products down around 50% and still profit. An example of that is the industry I'm currently working in, we sell a product for $3.85 per unit, and in the grocery store, it sells to the consumer for $8.79 per unit. Customers generally have no idea how much products are marked up. In this example, they can have a sale to draw in customers and mark that item 50% off (that'll never happen) and still turn a profit on the item.

To further this... the grocery store does not pay shipping, we eat that cost. If it goes to their supply depot, and they ship to their own stores, guess what? They send us a fuel surcharge bill to cover that cost. Ship multiple items on a single pallet? Yep, that's another charge the manufacturer eats. The grocery store is all about profit, which is why they in fact have record profits, at least where I am.

Apologies for the longer rant. It's mind blowing sometimes. So when you see those sales, they're still profiting. So back to my suggestion: some cost vs the average market price could use some balancing as sales in the store can obliterate your profits completely. If the point of sales is to draw in more customers in the game, I'm not so sure the profit loss is worth the extra customers.

When I sell peanut butter in-game, the market avg price is roughly double the cost price, so there is appropriate profit. The profit on toilet paper is fairly decent as well as most other items. Wine is great for profit. For some reason, while the cost of Whiskey is expensive, the markup is so small that a sale could mean a deficit instead of profit.