Functionality of Cafe's Opened By Sims

Drinks of any sort are tricky to sell on a retail lot; you have to direct your Sim to make the drink, then immediately cancel the Drink action and set it for sale BEFORE they drink any of it. When I run a cafe, I mostly just sell foods (mostly baked goods) and keep a coffee maker and tea maker present to make it seem more cafe-like.

Customers won’t stick around to eat or drink, though. They’ll take everything to go, even if there are plenty of tables and chairs on the lot.

I don’t have Dine Out and don’t know how running a restaurant works, but I’d assume it’s probably more accurate than a retail business when it comes to running a cafe.

Fixed in what regard? As far as I know using GTW stores as cafes isn't an intended functionality of the retail system in that pack at all and it probably never will be. I think you might be able to prepare the drinks and mark them for sale but that'd be a bit odd... I guess. A bakery would work a lot better.

Otheriwse, your best bet would probably be to open up a restaurant that only sells food and drinks you'd find in a cafe. But of course, all your drinks would be coming from a chef's station and not an espresso bar, which may or may not ruin the experience for you.

With GTW, you can only sell the items you place. So you would have to make the espresso drink then put it on a surface and mark it for sale. Then a customer would haggle with your sales employees and you would have to close the deal.... not really worth all that effort for something so cheap.

With D.O. you would need to sit the customers, give them a menu and wait for them to order... you could make a custom menu just with drinks.

The only way customers wait in line at a counter is with the food stalls from City Living... you could try putting a coffe food stall in your cafe... it might be fun experimenting with.

You could start a bakery and sell muffins and danishes at your store and place a coffee food stall in the cafe...



I think your best bet is to complete the food aspiration (so food never expires) and use that sim to make muffins, bagels, and coffee. Then place that stuff on the counters and just run it like a standard GTW shop...

Yeah, as others have said, the functionality of running a GT cafe and making money with GTW retail function never was a thing, so it's not glitched. I can see where you would think it would be a thing, tho, since there are a lot of similar functions in the game. I'm guessing that when Get Together came out, the devs weren't thinking about backward compatibility as much as they have since.

If you do run a bakery, tho, you don't have to worry about the food spoiling that quick when you place it in a display case. Most baked goods last a couple weeks or over in there.

I run a gallery and bakery together, but I usually don't use the retail interactions to sell the baked goods. I only interact with the Sims who seem to be looking at the artwork. Enough Sims buy the food since it's way cheaper anyway and they tend to gravitate toward that. I have coffee made in a pot, in case they want to help themselves to that, but it's free, haha. I can make enough money from the artwork to make it worth my while. The family that owns it is a large one, and the young adult daughter painter and baker grandma run the business. The parents both have jobs, so the daughter is getting on her feet with the retail business. I will move her out, and she will buy it from the folks. Every time she makes enough in the business to buy a 15,000 violin, I put it in her inventory. She will have enough soon. :smiley:

You could technically put a barista bar in a bakery, and then hire a barista. But you won't make any money from the drinks or baked goods sold from it. The barista baked goods would then be competing against the homemade ones, I guess, too.