GTW Retail Done Right

"pjericksim;c-16950846" wrote:
GTW & Seasons.

I bought the expansion pack to function like OFB in SIMS2, where I was able to stage aspiration awards for sale in my little "bodega."

But because of other reasons, I never really paid attention to the features in this expansion pack up until now. So, I'm trying to run a retail operation and I've found that it's easier to run if you have multiple family members assisting in the business to keep it running... but at the same time (especially with seasons) it's hard to pay attention to the business while also paying attention to the gardens at home. Any advice?

There's 3 ways I'd do that (2 vanilla, 1 modded):
1-Have one of the household members commit to the garden, once you raise his skill enough to unlock "Tend Garden", just set him to do that (he'll automatically water and weed all plants in the area). You could always hire a gardener but I'm guessing it'd be more in tune if you have one of your sims do it.
2-Bring the garden to the retail lot if you spend a lot of time there and do the same as step 1.
3-(Modded) LittleMsSam Retail Overhaul. If you sell items that are cheaper (say, $50-$500 range), I cannot recommend this enough. Your employees will be as useful as family members, your customers will be more logical. With employees taking care of sales, ringing up and cleaning, you can even let them take care of it all while you focus on your garden (at that point I'd recommend bringing it to the retail lot)

**Be aware that AFAIK plants will grow/produce harvestables between 5-7 AM (Can't remember the exact time). You MUST be present in the lot they are in at that time frame, so if you bring the garden to the bodega, you have to be there at that time. Some people do a hybrid of house/retail where they have sims live at their retail lots, it works well (kind of like TS2 OFB home businesses but not quite since the game doesn't think of it as your actual home).

If you go unmodded I'd definitely recommend sticking to using family members to run the business, you'll pull your hair out with employees vanilla. Maybe use one only for ringing up customers, but that's about it.

I can relate to this, I currently run (modded that is) a rather big mall, with 8 stores (one of them being a grocery shop selling harvestables). I set the markup to 15% only (it balances it out well given that customers buy a great variety of things, from clothing, to $4k plasma TVs, to $10k PCs, to $100 baked goods, to $50 harvestables, etc. so there's always profit without being overwhelming). Also paying 9 employees takes a good $2.5k or so from my budget after 8 hours. For harvestables only I'd recommend going at least 50% markup and sucking up to customers a lot (getting the sales perk helps a lot too).