The Retail system

RosiaMia_

Being a MASSIVE fan of The Sims 2 Open for business I loved that we got the retail system back with The Sims 4 Get to work. however...

I built a boutique selling flowers which I love the outcome but finding it hard to work the retail side of it, couple that I'm struggling with:

• My staff end up sitting down instead of selling stock or working
• My sim chats more than serves customers

I think the retail side needs to be re-looked at and made more like Open for business, because at the minute it's pretty hard to work. I think the customers need to come to the till for the sale to be completed.

Cafes -

People should eat & drink not just buy and leave

Goldmoldar

Yeah I tried it too and gave up because the Sims in Sims 4 are generally social and while they may initially do their job, they slack off and start chatting. This is prevalent in GTW as well give your sim a job the sim does not complete the job and you find the sim chatting.

RosiaMia_

Goldmoldar wrote: »

Yeah I tried it too and gave up because the Sims in Sims 4 are generally social and while they may initially do their job, they slack off and start chatting. This is prevalent in GTW as well give your sim a job the sim does not complete the job and you find the sim chatting.

Yeah makes working in retail hard.

Social maybe needs turning down a little bit?

FairyGodMother

I have never tried Retail yet, but have seen some threads with complaints about it

Cinebar

Some things I had to work around but this will not stop customers from bunching up in one corner and or employees. It's sad I can't have one table or seat in a business or they will all go sit down to talk (Most Annoying Feature of TS4 is Sims Prefer to Sit When Speaking..Per Guru this is a feature) I can't put any seat or table in a shop. It can only work if you build an office and lock the door for your own owner and not the employees at all. The retail in GTW is so lame I stopped playing it months ago and just set up NPC stores or cafes.

Café problems...so I built a café months ago before cafes were in the game, My Sims go there to eat breakfast or lunch together (before group ability) and take their food outside to eat at the café tables. It works better than the actual cafes. lol

drake_mccarty

Retail is half baked in Sims 4, and unfortunately I believe they said they currently have no plans on developing it further.

I was stoked for it originally, OFB was a remarkable EP in Sims 2. The employees in 4 do next to nothing, there's little options when managing your "business", and I'm not at all a fan of the tablets (they couldn't animate a register? Seriously?). I do like the mannequins, but not how you are limited to a set number. IMO they knew that an OFB type of pack was in demand and they should have let it stand on its own instead of throwing a ridiculously watered down retail system in with GTW.

ECrafters99

All of the sims try to chat. You have to watch all of them. Here is a tip to make it easier. Make it a family business (whereas you bring the entire family to work there), build a little "break room" for only your household, have one of your family on ringing up customers and restocking only (makes it a lot easier so that way one is trying to get the customer to buy and the other is ringing them up afterwards.)

RosiaMia_

Hopefully if they make a restaurant EP or Gamepack could add more features

Luke

@RosiaMia_ This is actually a really good suggestion.

Perhaps if they make another EP/GP that has to do with retail AI, they can revamp it a little bit and implement it in a patch for GTW.

I agree with everyone's concerns ... I do like some aspects of GTW's retail system, but the employees feel entirely useless. I remember when my one employee actually took down an order. I was so surprised! It makes things so much better when the employees can actually do their jobs.

I suggested (when GTW first came out and everyone was complaining about the retail) that they tweak the AI in retail environments so that the employee's productivity scales with their "retail stats" ... I did think that perhaps the GTW retail was more of a challenge, and I wasn't getting something, so I did play it extensively ... however, I quickly realised that it isn't that they made it challenging for store owners, but an actual flaw in the game mechanics. I could clearly see when an employee was going to take down an order, but would be interrupted by something autonomous like smelling the air around good smelling food ... it would cause their retail action to disappear and they would just go back to whatever they were doing, treating the waiting customer as if they weren't there.

I have noticed that this sort of thing happens in other areas of my game, where queued actions are cancelled due to autonomy. It's an issue that I definitely want fixed.

rosemow

Hello.
In this linked thread in Sims 4 General Discussions, the Developers are asking for the save games of simmers who have been running retail stores in their games. You may like to send your save games to them.
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/883611/help-the-dev-team-retail-saves#latest