This is an idea to keep the mid/late-game more dynamic since right now, once you have things set up, you can essentially ignore your shop until someone retires.
It would be cool if you could hire a “market trend researcher” that can predict seasonal retail items you can sell in addition to your regular items.
This could lead to some fun/risky gameplay. For instance: with a highly skilled employee, you might be able to predict future/upcoming trends. Perhaps you could preemptively buy out the complete stock of the seasonal item - of course, you would have to store it in your warehouse until the season starts, but then, you can crank up the price a lot since you are the only one that has it.
But if you buy too much, or inaccurately predict a trend, you could end up with a bunch of worthless inventory items you need to trash and lose most of your investment.
I like this idea. The items could also be somewhat predictable:
How about seasonal holidays having an impact on the sales of certain items? As this is in New York, it would be based on big American holidays. Using the 60days = 1 year time scale of the story mode, each season is 15 days. Having specific items sell better during some portion of the seasons would be an added layer to the game.
Spring- Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day – Increased sales of Flowers and Jewelry
Summer- July 4th and Vacations – Increased sales of fast food (as people are out and about) and
clothing (as people prepare to go on vacation)
Fall - Halloween and Thanksgiving – Increased Grocery and Wine sales
What about having a business where you sell different products and you can read what future holds on the market, what new product will appear and can have possibility high demand, why not adding rumors, news and opportunities feature where you study what new product will appear and if you understand that the x product will become mainstream, you start to order a lot of that good for cheap and start selling later when announced & released so you can start selling a lot early for good profits before it’s becoming saturated the market with that good.
Lots of goods have seasonality; and this should be reflected. Hot drinks will sell better in winter, cold in summer, etc. This could be extended to day-to-day weather, where it’s just more likely you’ll get hot in summer and cold in winter; but you can still experience other effects day to day.
When I visited New York in summer; I went into stores / cafes just to get a blast of the air-con!
As well as being straight up based on the actual seasons and their weather; there can be other seasonal influences as well - specific holiday merchandise such as Halloween will make good money around that date, but will have to be practically given away (or take up storage space into the following year) after the date has passed.
Product ‘newness’:
In retail businesses like clothes shops, bookshops or electronics - you will always have new fashions/releases which are more expensive to buy (or maybe harder to find / get a deal on) and in great demand whilst they’re brand new. Not having access to the latest things might be detrimental for a shop as it won’t attract destination shoppers.
Over time, a product should downgrade itself: ie. Latest Fashion → Fashionable → Last Seasons → Everyday might be a path for clothing, rather than just ‘cheap’ and ‘expensive’.
The idea here being that you just don’t get to spam 10,000 expensive clothes into your storage system, because by the time you sell through them, you paid for 10,000 expensive clothes but 8,000 of them got sold at everyday prices and you lost money.
This could also be tied in with events that happen randomly or on schedule.
Say I have a clothes shop; and somewhere in the city I know there’s a big fashion show going to happen.
First of all, I can get involved in the show (sponsoring it to provide traffic to my shop).
Second of all, I need to prepare my shop - it needs to be well stocked with the ‘latest’ version of whatever is on show. I will pay a premium for this.
Thirdly, the show needs to have an outcome. It is successful and business booms, it’s neutral and nothing happens, it’s not successful and business is slowed. Whatabout a ‘critical failure’ state that means it bombs and all my latest fashion gear is instantly downgraded to ‘last season’ or ‘everyday’ clothing?
It would be cool if capacity and demand changed over different seasons, like christmas, easter etc. Christmas might increase demand for gift shops, black friday might double the capacity, stuff like that, in addition to chance based positive and negative events.
Such an event could include a pandemic event where 2 or less of the following would occur; 1/4 demand on all items, enforced closing of gift shops and/or fast food retail, reduced effectiveness of non-voogle ads, increased effectiveness of voogle ads, random staff absences for 1 or more days, additional staff demands, increased delivery sales (if you ever add a shop-to-door delivery mechanic to the game) etc, or presidential election day, decreased effectiveness of non-gift or non fast food shops, increased fast food demand, increased fast food capacity, increased staff absences, increased staff demands.