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GTW: running a retail is hell

Hello fellow simmers,

I tried to follow my sim's dreams and open a bakery as I loved doing it with the sims 2.

I can not begin to express how much of a disappointment this was...

I just wanted my sim to bake delicious cakes and sell them.

This was supposed to be easy... Well...

Customers don't buy anything and apart from standing in the middle of the shop for hours and talk, nothing else happens.

I'm so disappointed...

Anyone found a mod or something that actually makes it work and resemble an actual working bakery?

Comments

  • determigdetermig Posts: 75 Member
    Same here. Seems like this problem has been going on since it came out. I don't understand why they just don't set sims to not socialize in a retail store...
  • Simsfan99111Simsfan99111 Posts: 1,260 Member
    Do you try to make a sale by interacting with the customer?
  • drake_mccartydrake_mccarty Posts: 6,114 Member
    Socialization ruins this feature. Customers rarely buy anything on their own, and to get them to buy anything you must spam retail socials over and over to fill their shopping meter. It's a tedious grind that's become incredibly repetitive at this point.

    I literally had my store open for an entire Sim day and made 1 sale. I would say the feature is broken, but it's been like this since Day 1 so that isn't the case. It's a bad design that will never get improved, or expanded upon.
  • SimGuruGrahamSimGuruGraham Posts: 1,188 SimGuru
    Quick suggestion... if you lower your prices, then customers will be more prone to make purchases on their own, or with minimum need to chat them up to make a sale. The higher your prices, the more convincing they need to buy. Essentially you can choose to go for a thin profit margin per sale and a high volume of sales to make money, or spend your time selling a handful of expensive high end items to turn a profit.

    For relatively inexpensive items - such as selling baked goods - I'd certainly recommend lower prices so that you, or your employees, are always ringing someone up.
  • DeservedCriticismDeservedCriticism Posts: 2,251 Member
    edited May 2017
    Quick suggestion... if you lower your prices, then customers will be more prone to make purchases on their own, or with minimum need to chat them up to make a sale. The higher your prices, the more convincing they need to buy. Essentially you can choose to go for a thin profit margin per sale and a high volume of sales to make money, or spend your time selling a handful of expensive high end items to turn a profit.

    For relatively inexpensive items - such as selling baked goods - I'd certainly recommend lower prices so that you, or your employees, are always ringing someone up.

    @SimGuruGraham This is not a matter of prices, as @drake_mccarty said this is a socialization issue. You guys need to seriously tone down multitasking and the desire to socialize, as those stand at the heart of both this problem AND musical chairs.

    Employees? They all have AI telling them to socialize. It's as if the Sims seek out to satisfy as many needs as possible, and since socializing is almost always possible at all times, our Sims constantly constantly seek to chat. If I send my Sim to the park, I can expect him to want to chat up a random stranger within the first 3-5 seconds.

    Same applies to the Employees, and the problem is this causes Employees to endlessly chat with each other. They seemingly get stuck in the conversation, because again the way conversations flow, if an employee gets a command to go ring up a customer, but then their chat partner wants to tell them a story, the game will prioritize the story first since the conversation is already taking place; sims seem to only successfully exit convos once all queue'ed socializations are completed, and as such, employees are worthless.

    Then the problem extends to customers.
    Y'know the advice I was gonna give to OP? Always solicit loner customers, never bother with groups. Why? Exact same reasoning: simply introducing yourself into a group means that you must sit and wait as each individual takes their turn waving to your sim, and THEN you must wait for all the pre-queue'ed social interactions by every member of that conversation to finish, and THEN you might still have to wait, because if your sales interaction breaks the target sim out of the conversation, then new socials get priority over your sale. You might wait hours just for one sales pitch if your target is in a group convo.

    Now it snowballs further:
    your employees do not recognize the difference between groups vs. loners. This means the moment an employee solicits a sim that's in a group, GG it's over. That employee is now useless for the rest of the day. You have to hope that group convo dies down or that random Sims decide to leave, because as it stands, your employee is now at the mercy of that never-ending conversation. The customers are the same. ANY employee or customer involved in a group conversation with 3 sims or more effectively "isn't" in the store because it's inconceivable they're ever gonna get around to doing their expected functions.

    The end result is that the most efficient way to run a store is to only employ your own sims you have full control over and only ever bother soliciting loners OR if you have time to tackle the groups, always try and pull someone away from the group one at a time....which itself is a tedious matter of spamming "Call Over" and rather time-consuming.

    Exact same problem is behind musical chairs: Sims have this desire to try and sit as close as possible to their conversation partner, the problem being that the way the group dynamic works and their general reaction time is poor, so you might see a Sim at the dining table move to the sofa while the sofa Sim moves to the dining table, then the game realizes they're still not next to each other, then it moves one of them back. Or if one of those two decides they want a drink at the bar and go to fetch it, the other sim will not be content with sitting and waiting, and will insist on getting up to follow the sim that went to the bar, and will likewise insist on sitting back down when the sim sits back down after they get their drink.


    Now you may respond and say lowering prices at least increases the likelihood that they roll a desire to purchase an object, but here's a couple problems:

    1) Does it lower it enough so that the Sim goes for the item before they socialize with anyone? (Spoiler alert: it usually doesn't)

    2) Obviously we'd all like the ability to charge more and earn more money, but you're effectively telling us we can't

    The problem with your suggestion is that it's basically providing a workaround rather than acknowledging the source problem. The source of the problem is multitasking socialization. This game needs some rather serious retweaks to how that works, otherwise not only will this problem continue, but you're going to see the multitasking negatively affect future packs and future features aswell. I mean musical chairs certainly isn't dead in Dine Out, either. They mitigated it a tad by glueing the meals to the tables to kind of force meal arrival to cancel all socials, but I certainly still see Sims get up to be close to their discussion partner, and I've seen them grab discussion partners across the room for no reason other than the game having an AI that more or less causes Sims to obsessively seek out social interactions regardless of their situation.

    This issue needs to be addressed, or users such as OP will never be satisfied with the features as-is, and future pack concepts run a high risk of likewise being ruined by this same beast.
    "Who are you, that do not know your history?"
  • drake_mccartydrake_mccarty Posts: 6,114 Member
    edited May 2017
    Quick suggestion... if you lower your prices, then customers will be more prone to make purchases on their own, or with minimum need to chat them up to make a sale. The higher your prices, the more convincing they need to buy. Essentially you can choose to go for a thin profit margin per sale and a high volume of sales to make money, or spend your time selling a handful of expensive high end items to turn a profit.

    For relatively inexpensive items - such as selling baked goods - I'd certainly recommend lower prices so that you, or your employees, are always ringing someone up.

    I have tried various sales markups, all of which result in the same thing: customers assembling into groups to chit chat. The frequency of a Sim autonomously buying anything is low, even on the lowest markup. To get a guaranteed sale you have to spam retail socials repeatedly, which is a tiresome approach because retail socials only work on one target sim. So while I spend 15 real life minutes spamming retail socials trying to get a single sale, none of the sims in the background are perusing merchandise, they're talking. Which means after I spent all that time for one sale, I have to do it all over again. Employees fall victim to the social trap as well, so it makes having them kind of useless to me.

    IMO two possible solutions would be: increasing the rate that customers shopping meter increases (without player interaction), and/or making retail socials have a bigger effect on the meter and have these socials work on a whole group of Sims instead of just one target.

    ETA: Another solution would be to tone down the overwhelmingly social nature of the Sims. Invasive socials are a problem that plagues the game in general, but they make matters worse when you're trying to run a profitable retail store.
    Post edited by drake_mccarty on
  • MissCherieMissCherie Posts: 408 Member
    Pretty much what the others said, it's not the pricing the issue, it's the social interactions, all customers chat with each other in a group chat, and they chat for hours making it impossible to sell anything, and as mentioned the employees do chat with them as well.

    It's worse for retail cause it make it tedious, you can easily spend 10 hours (sims hours) without a single sale.

    But it can be annoying in other situations, everytime my sims have a date, random townies come interrupting them cause they wanna chat with my sims, I try to cancel it, but they keep coming back.

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  • ConclueConclue Posts: 2,307 Member
    edited May 2017
    If EA plans on running Sims 4 past the typical 5 year time frame of a series, I would suggest they cut some time from "Free update" budget and work on some fixes for these issues. I should be stoked about the retail system but I'm not.

    I'm actually hoping there is a modder out there working on a solution to this problem, and the (sorry Graham you know I love your work) poor choice to have Sims rung up by an iPad... but again seemingly doesn't seem to matter because how this system conflicts with another system.

    It's one of those "clearly a mis managment" issues - we got news prior to 4 releasing that it was "completely mis-managed" and it shows. I am proud of the path the game is taking, with the exception of EP's. I don't know if it's the specific team that's working on EP's but GP's seem to be on point and EP's are raising eyebrows, time and time again.

    They bring back apartments but make them special lots we can't create. I don't understand what's so difficult to code that? They did it almost 10 years ago, why couldn't they now? the team? budget? What? I'm not master programmer but basically anything inside walls and fences with only 1 door to enter that "zone" from is considered an apartment with the correct door. I don't get why they needed to be separate lots. It's very confusing from an long time simmers perspective.

    It's frustrating because they bring all this new and great stuff to the Sims game that's never been done before (like Parenthood is gonna have us setting tables, how adorable is that?) but then they bring back old features and the question then becomes, why did you bother?

    I wonder if theres a rule in EA that says developers can't copy old stuff identically for legal purposes or something? Some of the "management choices" are downright, well, ridiculous! LMAO!

    And everyone and anyone who knows the Sims 3 era an the guru's, knows that SimGuruGraham is all of that.... so it ain't his deciding... recall that when relaying feedback to him.
  • Sim2SporeSim2Spore Posts: 284 Member
    edited May 2017
    I do think that the customer socializing does need to be toned down, because honestly it is very tedious having to wade through so many group conversations just to make a quick sale.

    However, even at only 25% markup, I don't really have a problem making sales. I had a clothing store open for only 8 sim hours and made 6 sales. 4 of which had no influence from me at all, granted, the store is tiny and I haven't even hired a single employee yet.

    I think that bakeries and photo studios are honestly the hardest of the retail options, simply because the items are worth so little that it's nearly impossible to churn a livable profit if you can't make like dozens of sales per week, which makes no sense given how long it takes to sell things. And these are the skills that GTW added with the intent of using them for retail purposes.
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