I ended up selling all my bugged stores. Not only do customers and employees not show up when I visit shops as other households, I also had this lovely surprise after having a shop with a single employee open for five hours.
(Where do I get a job that pays me that much? 😉)
I was particularly sad to sell Caleb’s Oddities; it was a weird little shop that I had a lot of fun playing... until it broke. 🙁 But I can’t afford that employee, and only hired her because another thread said hiring someone would cause the shop to start working again. It didn’t, by the way. She only came to work when the owning household opened it.
