Your neighborhood is growing. There are more and more people. Your small store used to be in the suburbs, now it’s at the very center of the district. You’ll need to expand and eventually build it up into a supermarket with all that this endeavour entails.
Aim to expand the types of goods you offer, provide a better and faster service than your competition, make sure your customers are satisfied and hire employees to aid your growth. The competition won’t be happy, but that is just another thing you’ll have to deal with.
Your Store
There is a lot you have to do to bring the small store up to speed and you will have a lot of freedom to do so. Renovating the interior and exterior play a major role in the process and include things like moving, removing or erecting walls, installations or interior design. Outside you are not limited to your shop building either. You can build a variety of things like parking spaces or even a playground to make your shop more interesting for your customers and to set it apart from the competition in the area.
As you might have expected, money is the limiting factor so you won’t be able to make all your dreams come through from the get-go. As your shop makes money, you will be able to build more things and expand the size of your shop up to the point where it becomes a sizeable supermarket.
Your Job
There is a lot to be done once you open your shop. You have to decide on the goods you want to sell, how to present them to your customers, where to place them, set the prices, create special offers and make sure the shelves are stocked. Empty shelves make a bad impression on customers. And so does dirt or spilled goods.
Keeping your shop clean is another area for you to deal with on a daily basis. Sure, you can use an old fashioned broom and safe some money, but you can also go with the times and deploy more modern solutions like electric cleaning carts and safe time instead. Since we are on the subject of keeping things tidy, you will also have to repaint the walls every now and then, change up the interior a bit to keep things interesting and reorder shelves to improve the shopping experience when your shop and and your offered goods increase.
Your Offer
What goods you offer to your customers play an important role on the road to your success. You want to sell things everybody needs, but you also want to attract customers by selling things the competition doesn’t. The game will aid you in checking the competition’s pricing and allow you to quickly adjust your prices and create special offers. Picking your suppliers is important, too. You want good prices of course, but you also want reliability and consistency to help you keep a good stock of fresh goods and order things you are running out quickly.
Your Employees
We don’t expect you to do everything by yourself, especially as the tasks above are just few examples of what the game has in store for you. As your shop grows, you will need to hire help to take care of many tasks. Make sure your hire the right people for the right jobs or things might get awkward very quick. The game will offer you tools to check competences, skills and performance of your employees and help you navigate the challange of keeping employee costs at bay while proving the best possible service for your customers.
Your Competition
You are not doing business in a vacuum. There is competition. Other shops will try to offer better goods, try to undercut your prices and when that doesn’t work, they may try a different approach. Calling various inspections on you can become troublesome if you fall behind in some areas and it doesn’t stop there. Your competition might even go a step further by setting a dumpster on fire, sabotaging your power supply or wrecking havoc on your water pipes to cause a lot of headaches and certainly interrupt the daily business.
That’s why you’ll be able to invest into the safety of your store with things like cameras or even hire security to keep your business safe. That will also help with shoplifters. You can’t chase them on your own all the time.
But there is a lot more to competing. The monthly competition for the best store organized the mayor’s office is a big deal. The prestige, increased customer interest and money that comes along with a win can help you advance quicker. Winning isn’t easy though. Your shop has to be in top shape and your employees on their best behavior. And your competition knows it and might play it smart by focusing their efforts on that particular day.
There is a lot to Supermarket Simulator beyond what we described for you here. And while the mechanics and gameplay loops are built for engagement and immersion, we have not forgotten a certain degree of silliness to accompany the serious aspect of this endeavor.
