I tried left and right to make retail work vanilla, but ultimately failed. Granted, this depends on what you consider "right", and if that is simply making money then there are ways of course to do so...
I seem to do okay with base retail ops (no cc currently) however, the celebs that come in definitely do not like to be interacted with and more often than not I end up asking them to leave w/o a purchase. I really miss some of the features that were part of S2 OFB. As has been said many times though: the developers are going to take this game and the content they produce in the direction THEY want to.