Shopping center size

[DaveOath]

I'm planning for a district with 5 700 pop (30 x 190 pop prefab).

Can you care for everybody with two shopping centers (180 customers each, 360 total)?

I built a large one in a 4672 pop district; at most, I have ~250 customers. So two smalls should be enough for 5700 pop...

But I'm confused cause I always assumed 5000 pop need a large shopping center to fulfill the demand.

[Strategic Sage]

The question I would ask is why did you assume that?

One large one would be more efficient, but based on the numbers given two small would work.

[DaveOath]

Originally posted by Strategic Sage:

The question I would ask is why did you assume that?

One large one would be more efficient, but based on the numbers given two small would work.

I read that somewhere, but I can't remember where; I never challenged this "fact" until today...

I ask because of the new shopping centers available in the last update. They have two factory connections: one for a warehouse and one for cold storage, i.e., no forklifts are necessary. You need forklifts with a large shopping center because there's only one factory connection, something I want to avoid.

[Strategic Sage]

FWIW, it all depends on your setup; you don't actually need factory connections at all. Nothing wrong with doing it that way of course, but I deliver all resources to my shopping centers via truck.

[Silent_Shadow]

Originally posted by DaveOath:

You need forklifts with a large shopping center because there's only one factory connection, something I want to avoid.

You need forklifts or trucks with any shop or shopping center, as shops/stores have a mechanic where they will be unable to restock from connected storages if too many workers are occupied with serving customers.

[Novu]

If you build 5700 housing units your actual population will swell to around 9000 because of all the kids and 21+ adults living with parents. The two shopping centers will be able to handle the initial 5700 workers but you are going to run into trouble when they start having kids.

[DaveOath]

Originally posted by Strategic Sage:

FWIW, it all depends on your setup; you don't actually need factory connections at all. Nothing wrong with doing it that way of course, but I deliver all resources to my shopping centers via truck.

I like having a large buffer in warehouses connected to the shopping center. If a delivery is delayed for some reason, no impact on the population.

[DaveOath]

Originally posted by Silent_Shadow:

You need forklifts or trucks with any shop or shopping center, as shops/stores have a mechanic where they will be unable to restock from connected storages if too many workers are occupied with serving customers.

Thanks for this very important information. I was not aware of that.

[dustyd]

In my towns, the shopping centres typically operate at around 75% efficiency, meaning that, on average, only 75% of the slots are available for customers. Also, on average, 5.5% of my worker population is shopping for food. While getting food they will of course get meat clothes and electronics if they need them and they are available. If you want to build the dedicated store for electronics/clothes, it will typically have 1.5% of population occupancy. The quantity of goods each adult will purchase each day will vary depending on how far they had to travel for work and whether or not they have children living with them, but regardless of the quantity they need the amount of time it takes them to shop is constant.

So the number of ADULTS that each store can consistently supply:

Grocery store: 1400
Small store: 5200
Shopping centre (150) : 2050
Shopping centre (180) : 2454
Shopping centre (405) 5522

They can support populations larger than that if you are willing to have some queue outside the shop. This is usually fine, but does eat into citizen free time which can have other consequences.

[Delle(DK)]

I wont go into math, but my recommendation is to build 2 large shopping centers an have them connect to a meat storage and a warehouse and public transport nearby.
The reason is to be on the safe side if one burn down, or if there is to few workers in one of them for x days then people can go to the other one.
I know two big shopping centers sound like overkill, but once you start to build the big 550people skykscrapers from the ukraine DLC and have like 4 nearby then allot of people will go shopping and they are hungry ;-)