You cant work in your own restaurant, probably in any kind of ‘low ticket price’ shop, not if you want it to be profitable.
Yes, you can assign yourself a shift and work there, but you will instantly make the business unprofitable, and it is because of the length of in game days.
- a building with a 30 customer per hour capacity, with two cashiers, serves 30 customers per hour while you are not in the building, and this is profitable.
- If you attend the business yourself, either working a cashier, or just observing/stocking/cleaning, each cashier only serves about 4-6 customers per in game hour. This makes the business unprofitable. The simple problem is that the in game hours are so short in real time, that the animations just take too long to serve the ‘correct’ number of customers per hour. So, if you observe your workers, they work at 25% speed and this is the result: long lines at each cashier.
This is not such a problem at businesses like gifts or jewelry, where each customer spends much more, so the hourly income is not destroyed so badly, but it is still a factor.
The overall result is that you really cant enter your own businesses, ever, if you care about their income. by your simple presence, you make them inefficient. This is a quite a significant problem for the game experience.
There are several solutions:
- make in game days longer. they are pretty short anyway, when you do a delivery run it already takes half the day and it is frustrating.
- make the customer serving animations faster. this is possible, but problematic, as they would look weird.
- Make ‘in person’ sales higher value, to offset the slower rate. This would need to be graded per product, and is pretty complicated.
I understand none of these solutions are ideal, but not being able to work in your own business is a pretty bad feature for a game where you are supposed to be able to work in your own business.
This issue is especially important since I see from a lot of streamers and comments in discord etc. that very few players have noticed this quite subtle issue, and really many of them are giving up on this kind of shop or getting very frustrated.