You Helped Make This: Retail Reloaded Coming Soon! (Patreon)

I'm working on a Retail Reloaded feature that will go into early access for all Early Access level patrons very soon and want to show what's coming.

Managing time and Sims' lives is one of my favorite things in the franchise, and because of this the Get to Work Retail system is one that really excited me. Having my own custom store and building it up to 5 stars is an appealing idea all by itself. But unfortunately, Sims 4's retail system really needs some polish. Customers do very annoying things and pick random objects when they're checking out. In the meantime, you spam socials to get their purchase meters full. It's great on paper, but needs some love. 

Of course, I plan to make celebrities and other NPCs/behaviors less annoying, but I also want to modify how the system works.

Something I wanted to address first was adding the ability to check out customers at the cash register. Tend Register is a new feature in Retail Reloaded. This is such a basic thing, but it feels good that you can be hands off with the checkout process so you can make a shop more like a grocery store, bakery, or dollar store. 

You can pick an employee to do this, or manage it yourself. Customers will come to the register and get checked out in the order they arrived. Customers do a scan on checkout to see if someone is doing it, and if not, they will let you check them out the old way.

Because I felt it'd be a nice touch. if you Tend Register after a customer is ready to check out, they'll get called over to get in line. This could let you multitask then man the register when customers are ready.

Purchase Intent is a stat that customers use to decide when to buy. It's the little meter you see. Customers then pick random objects in their price range. I came to realize that if we actually made it so that customers only buy from the objects that they browsed, then you'd be able to actually strategize a little! If you see a customer looking at something expensive, put on your smiling salesperson face and go in for the kill! Butter them up, then hope that the object is within their budget!

Grocery stores often have highly competitive prices, and not much of a markup. A furniture store will have a much, much higher markup. Because of this, my friend and I in our testing felt that we should be offering a faster purchase rate for stores with low markups. This means you can sell a higher volume of items by letting customers get an added bonus to purchase intent when the markup is very low, helping them more rapidly buy. You don't browse a store four hours to buy a damn cupcake, right?

I have other ideas I'll talk about when I release the first early access version. We'll hone it based on feedback. I want running a store like this to feel different, and less frustrating for players.