Has anyone determined exactly what impacts amount of customers and how?

[seraphina]

This is mostly out of curiosity as I "finish" the game (just one last achievement to go and then I'm mostly waiting for video games and other new content, yay!). Trying to go out on a high note!

I know the game says decor helps, but in what way/how much? Is it like each piece of decor has a percentage chance to attract a new customer or does it raise the in-store customer cap by a certain amount? I also saw that they updated the customer cap based on store size, so I know that also plays a part!

Currently, I'm max level with all expansions. I have 3-4 of the largest size shelves for every genre and constantly adding more movies to try and hit that 1000 for the final achievement. All concessions, 5 candy shelves, 2 fridges, 3 gumball machines, and 8 arcade machines. Decor all over. I have days where I will spend the whole time handing out flyers, days I'll spend on the register, or days I do nothing but fulfill requests because I'm testing how my involvement impacts sales, and there's no difference between any of those three at this point. Still capped around $300-$400 on average like I've seen a lot of other people mentioning.

It makes me feel like I must have hit some sort of customer limit, especially if the flyers aren't making any difference, but I can't quite figure out what to do to get more people in and thus more income. I don't need to make a million dollars a day; I know that's not the point of the game and I *love* the game. It's almost like a puzzle at this point! What does what to influence customer count and spending? Does a neon light on the wall add 1 more customer and the coffin near the horror movies makes them rent 2% more horror movies?

I'd love to hear from anyone who knows for sure how it works!

[Morilibus]

I have not figure it out either :)

It almost feels like nothing I can do makes much of a difference. That said I am getting more towards $500 on weekdays and $700 on weekends. (Net)

I am lvl 20, have two employess that cost $88, have all store expansions

I am not certain how much handing out flyers helps. Sometimes I do it sometimes I don't and I don't really notice a difference. I used to hand them out continuously thinking it did but wasn't really enjoying doing that so I stopped. Then didn't notice a drop in income from stopping.

I have decor. Kind of one of everything with some duplicates of things like signs and posters. I do keep a fair bit of the cardboard cutouts around. I also order my New Releases in batches of 10 and usually get 30-40 of them. So I ened up with multiple cardboard cutouts of each new release and use those to decorate further.

I tend to focus on making sure I have enough New Releases and if I notice I'm about to rent out the last one I'll order 10 more mid day. Then sell all but 15-20 once they are no longer new releases, and maybe sell off more later. So I think that might help with the income, but I also take a screenshot of the recap each day and my largest earning day which was over $800 and I had $0 in movie sales that day. I don't specifically remember that day though, so not sure. Maybe it was a theme day for the film that was on new release or something.

OR it makes me think the game just kind of balances itself out and reaches a cap at some point and not much we do changes things.

At this point I don't do much in game, just trying to get more shelves and movies and fill in the store and work on the layout. While I let my two employees take care of sales and returns and then I handle the phone and the special need customers, broken tape replacement, etc. I still feel like I am running around 50-75% of the time doing that.

[GrimRita]

I'm making on average $600-$800 with customers renting more than 1 video - some rent 4+snacks. I also help with returns and hand out flyers to those customers outside looking in. 8/10 they pop in.

I've essentially made my store easy to get around, massive focus on New Releases - 3 bays and buy 30+ copies of new releases on day 1 and a trick I have noticed with New Releases is that once they lose the 'new release' sticker, I still place them on my 3rd New release bay and customers still pick them up in large numbers.

Each category has 3-4 large shelf spaces and I placed Kids and Xmas together, with comedy and romance at the front of my store. Drama, Action, Police and Sci fi in one area with Horror and Western at the back, with Adult being in the room on it's own.

Outside of events and New release day, I can and have dropped down to $400 especially when it's a day full of interruptions.

[TheVillan]

I've tried testing flyers as best as I can, similar weather, same opening hours, similar number of copies of new releases and what i've found is that the difference in number of rented tapes and net income doesn't change much if I hand out no flyers or spend nearly all day doing flyers. Despite the number of "ooohs" and them heading to the shop the finances don't change much.

Dunno if anyone else has tried testing it to compare results.

[TheVillan]

I'll add that many shop sim games have caps on the number of NPCs that spawn in and/or can be in the shop at any one stage, which could be the case here. TCG got fully worked out to the degree of what every piece of deco adds to spawns etc, but that was through a number of people going through the game code.