If you keep taking the money rewards when your shop goes up levels you hit a point at which your retail outlet gets way ahead, and then you can start taking warehouse discount perks and pay somebody to man the till, and you'll find yourself very comfortably off and able to expand the stock. It's only the first few levels that are any sort of trouble. Basically, once the owner gets a gold sales badge to dazzle people with, the business will start gaining stars right and left, and will be out of the woods.

Businesses are actually very annoying to run when they get big, without Business Runs You or a similar mod. But it doesn't actually matter how easy or hard it is, clearly EA intended there to be one way to run a business, and that way wasn't buying things from the discounted lot catalog and then immediately selling them back.

While we're on businesses: There is actually no reason to have your prices at anything other than "ridiculously cheap". You will gain stars faster and you can use the money prize perks and you'll still earn a lot of money. Especially if you shut down your business and restart it every time you've reached maximum. If your household members are producing things you can sell them directly from the catalog as well, there's no reason to sell them via the business. (Unless for fun ofc.)

I use the teleporter shrub however, at 40 sims so I guess that could be considered cheating. But it's so much fun to manage so many customers. Takes about a day to reach level 10 in that case.

Since when does anybody here care how EA intended anything to work? Find something you enjoy doing, and go nuts.

SMUSTLE!!!

It's a wonderful easter egg.

"Go to College" is such a great cutscene. It always stirs me on some level. And the Aerosmith-type lick is perfect.

There are a limited number of cash bonuses, and they don't really go far if you are using them to buy additional businesses. Once I get a best of the best award I have enough trouble keeping things in stock with the prices set to expensive, so I never set things lower than that. You sell things at the same rate and get the same amount of stars, you just are selling them for more now.

The way I do it is every time I reach level 10, I close the business, then I restock everything that my sims didn't have time to stock, and then I mark everything as not for sale, shut down the business and open a new business on the same lot. If I want to keep earning the money perks, I just use a different sim as the owner that haven't earned them yet. You can also stop at level 5 if you're only interested in the money perks. I rarely use community lots since time doesn't pass there. I even downloaded mods so that I can have a home supermarket. In my experience lower prices sell faster, that works better since it's so much micromanaging to use salesmen. My sims only earn the sales badges by helping confused customers. But that's just me! The lot I'm talking about has 10 sims and there's a lot of small items and a couple of big items, so it takes a while for everything to get out of stock.

If you want to satisfy the five top level businesses want you have to use the same sim and can only get the cash rewards once, and that's basically the only reason I ever have for running more than one business or shutting down a level 10 business. Yes, cheaper stuff sells faster, but if you're already selling things so quickly that your restockers can't restock them fast enough you don't actually gain anything by making things cheaper. It doesn't require any micromanagement to use salespeople if you have a mod like BRY installed.

I always have at least one high value ridiculously expensive item in stock. Like the 10,000 simoleon TV. Then when that one customer who is your best friend and also a very loyal patron comes in, you can dazzle him to buy it, make a nice profit, shut down the shop and go to the pub for the rest of the day.

Sorry sugoisama, I misunderstood your post. I didn't realise you were talking about selling back to the catalogue. I thought you meant selling to a customer in a shop, which is of course just what retail is about.

Well, maybe my misunderstanding will work out well for me, These posts and some subsequent ones seem very helpful. I think I'll have a word with my Sim retailers and try to reassure them that there is still hope for them. I'll try lowering the prices and suggest that, when things get busy, they concentrate on manning the till and restocking rather than selling. After all good quality stuff at a good price tends to sell itself. I suppose in my heart I'm a believer in the "pile 'em high, flog 'em cheap" school of business. I usually only tell my retail Sims to take the cash perks if they really, really need the money. Otherwise I tell them to go for the wholesale discount perks, as these increase their margins. I think that's the only way to successfully run a low price / high volume business. Without wholesale discounts, things you sell "ridiculously cheaply" will be sold at a loss.

Anyway, we'll try out some of your suggestions, though maybe not 40 Sims in a 1x1 shop. The thought of them all queueing at the till to pay for their purchases would give my rookie checkout operators apoplexy!

So far I think my best businesses have only reached level 4. Your posts have have given me the incentive to persevere a little longer. I'll pass the message on to the Sims concerned, and let the know that "Things can only get better!"

For the unscrupulous sim, there is always this method:
https://youtu.be/dA3HxvxUoKo?t=49

I never realised that Sims could 'salvage' in trash cans for money before! I have seen them eating out of the trash (I think it's a sloppy Sim thing?) but one of my Sims just went digging and turned up $8 which I was quite impressed by!

I don't.
I had it at some point but I removed it deliberately. I think it was because it clashed with another mod that made it so that customers will queue evenly at registers.

What did she do?

Increase the price of the TV from §1 to §555,555 after he'd decided to buy it?

It was all a bit fast for me.

Yeah, just before the tv vanished but after the buy bar was filled the price change window popped up. It seems really hard to pull off what with the sim having to like go up to it and do a little animation, but it might work better with the price tag tool and pausing the game. Still way too convoluted imo

They must have to be clever and sloppy to do this, Sim Sample only eats what he finds!

Yes, I had to slow it down too! I think they were doing a speed thing where they were trying to achieve something quickly. I wouldn't dare try this on my townies; they know where I live!

Living in REAL communism is still possible for Sims 2 sims only. And I can confirm it is not bad at all.

This is a TS2 thread, so please keep on topic.  There are a million other sites you can go debate/rant about whatever you want,  including politics.

@HugeLunatic -That's true here and I've posted about game related things here.I lost an enitre household once to starvation in my old vanilla TS2 game on my very old Windwos XP laptop because I had no welfare Mod and my household that died off had kept having bad luck with the job searches because I had no Mods at all and the friend requirement for promotions put some jobs almost off limits.I've also got a Mod unlocking career and aspiration rewards to buy mode in the game which also has helped with being able to use charisma podiums to rearn money while that job search is going on.
I've discovered that enire households can be saved fron dying off by installing a welfare Mod so they can get by while searching for a job.It's needed if you want to make job searching harder.

You don't necessarily need a mod. The vanilla game offers the kaching and familyfunds cheats, plus the money tree reward object. Familyfunds has the advantage of allowing you to determine exactly how much they get and when, but it only works if every household in your hood has a unique name.

It's better to use Mods because some challenges have rules about using those cheats and I didn't know about them when I lost that household.I would rather avoid cheating and a welfare Mod isn't cheating as long as you still have them search for jobs or start working at a craft or working as artisans to earn other money.I had to choose between staying vanilla and being forced to cheat a lot or Modding my game out and actually just being able to play without cheating except to place objects or fix a glitch.

If my sim is out of money they can still dig for treasure and even bones or rocks are sellable.

In my early game I simulated a family living on benefits by a very restricted use of the Kaching cheat. I used it when they really needed money for essentials like food or bills, but didn't allow them to buy luxuries. (It was the Moltke family, and I admit I also used it to buy christianlov's Easy Bed for Julian, as I really wanted him and Andrew to be able to sleep together. [They only slept together -- they didn't have woohoo until they got married late last year. Andrew is quite conservative in some of his thinking. -- But I'm drifting off topic! ]) The reason for them living on benefit was that they had a toddler -- little Hans -- at home, and I was so inexperienced as a player, that I found I needed both parents there to look after him. I suppose their teenage son could have helped more than he did, but, though his intentions were good, Julian was so head over heels in love with Andrew that he found it hard to think about anything else.

TadOlson, I don't think there's any need to get hung up because a feature is only available through the Cheats window. Some mods, and indeed some Maxis features (like money trees) feel much "cheatier" than the cheats. Using a "cheat" in The Sims -- a single player sandbox game -- is scarcely the same as marking your cards in a high stakes poker game. Or taking performance-enhancing drugs in the Olympics. Many of the things in "Cheats" are just ways of extending the game and making it more interesting. I don't feel I'm doing anything wrong, when I turn Aging Off to spend more time with Sims that I love. Or when I turn MoveObjects on to put a fire alarm above a window. In fact I'd feel I was doing something a lot more wrong if I turned Aging on to let an Elder die! (I'm an Elder myself, and I certainly wouldn't want anyone to do that to me!! ) It's up to each of us Simmers to decide for ourselves what "cheats", mods and Maxis features we're comfortable with.


On a different topic, Sunbee and I seem to have discovered that the game checks the work/school hours of Sims, when selecting visitors for the Welcome Wagon. It appears to only send Sims who are available at the time. See recent posts in the What do you make of the Welcome Wagon? thread.

I've suspected this for a while, as elders and pregnant women are disproportionately represented in the Wagon. Nice to have it confirmed.