Capacity of different retail stores

[lagrelax]

This is a question I recently realized and haven't found a good answer in the forum.

My current game is in a single city of a 600k+ population. I had a large farm in which produces Eggs (1 raise unit, 1 process unit, 1 sales unit). Due to the low cash balance at the beginning, I chose general store as my retail firms for its lowest fixed cost. I kept adjusting my rating about 10 above the local and kept adding the general stores trying to consume all the output from my farm. Now I got ~30 stores in a single city already but still my farm has piled a significant amount of inventories. Now I am wondering other than keeping spanning my retail reach, would an upgrade from general store to say a discounted supermarket would address the over-supply more efficiently? More generally, what is an appropriate ratio of farm/factory and retails for a decent efficiency.

[nosedigger]

From my experience, large farms should serve city with population of 2+ million, so all under that number should be medium farms. One more indicator is when you go to the Products info, and select Livestock products, you can see how large is actually market for each product for specific City, or for all cities in general. This translates to -> maybe market for eggs is 1mil$ and market for Lamb is 4mil$, which means you need more production units for lamb, where eggs could be serviced by one production unit on one farm.

For stores, general store,discount megastore, and department store don't generate additional sales via "increase in demand", that is provided by other specialized stores. Livestock product can be sold in Discount mega, Supermarket and Corner shop stores, however Discount will sell more for lower price, but Supermarket and Corner shop will sell less, with higher price. When I played I used to think that I need several supermarkets to sell my livestock products and be able to cover whole city area, until I realized that the perfect ratio is to setup one supermarket, drive traffic to it by building apartment building right next to it (with rent set to 60%) and setting up layout where one purchasing unit is connected to two sales units, and all of them are selling single product. This can be even more used with multiple stores feat from Subsidiary DLC. There is no perfect solution, that's the beauty of this game, and you need to experiment around a little.

Two more things that you need to be aware about is training and quality. With training on farm, units will start to produce more with higher quality, and livestock products are all about quality (especially that you always have local competitors that are invisible to you, but are maybe selling higher quality for less). This is fixable via two ways:
1) Hire COO that will control price and has expertise in farms of at least 40 -> when you assign him to the farm, all the units will immediately start with level 3, and you will have products of 40 quality, which is pretty good.
2) Create HR department in your HQ and use instant training for farms -> you need to find how much money to use to be able to train farm to lvl 3, but you will have no need for COO and will save money on yearly basis

Training and COO expertise in retail are also applicable to your stores, but this time higher unit level -> higher volume of sales (you can see this as blue line that represents supply, when the unit is lvl 1-3, the line will be a little choppy and the amount of inventory unit can hold is low, against higher lvl of units 5+, where the line is solid and the capacity is much much higher)

So, my advice for you is to try next:
1. Create medium farm, start producing Frozen Chicken with one unit (raising-processing-sales)
2. Open Supermarket store (traffic index of at least 39) with layout like this
S S S
I I I
P P P
I I I
S S S
3. Start by having first purchasing unit set to Frozen Chicken, and see if the utilization goes up to 100%. If it does, fill second purchasing, and then third.
4. Set the training to max
5. See what happens

Few notes: look at the market share while you are selling, if you want to optimize earnings, you shouldn't be covering whole market -> opening new stores to sell excess from the farm my result in far lesser sales than the first one. If both farm and supermarket are really profitable, the next store may not. Experiment around and inform yourself on COO (if you don't know about it), because no matter what the salary is, he is unburdening you from the wasting time setting up prices, and tinkering with small things, when you can be expanding your empire and setting up research and new companies. Also treat this as a test, not a play session, because your goal is to figure out and learn what is the optimal ratio of farms-stores, producing-selling units and product market. Save game before opening first farm so you can always go back and experiment with the same settings.

I'm here for further questions and discussions

[lagrelax]

Thanks nosedigger.

I have no issues selling my livestock products. My unit levels in the farm is up to 9 and I kept advertising them. So the overall rating is way higher than the local competitors. I set the price as the overall rating now is above ~10 higher than the local and the utilities in my retail sales units are ~100%. There is no other AI in this market and there is still significant market share left.

My question is that since I used a large farm, my general stores still not able to sell all of them. No product/market issues here and I just need more stores. I am wondering comparing to building more cheapest general stores, whether building other types store say discount megastore would help. Namely whether the volume of them would be larger assuming all other equal.

BTW my pricing strategy is to gradually increase it as my brand rating increase to keep a constant 10 gap with the local. Not sure how this would affect the volume

[nosedigger]

Oh, sorry then for the long post. Didn't know the level of you experience in the game.

Are you using Subsidiary DLC and multi-floor option for the retail stores ?

As I said, the mega discount store is definitely what it's name say - a mega store, so it can handle the highest volume of sales (it is 4x4, where specialized stores are 2x2). If there is no competition, and the market cap is really big for the selected product then pump up the discount mega stores, with traffic of at least 45+, and 3 Purchasing/6 Sales units per floor. The thing is that you have to lower price a little bit, since it is a discount store, but the shear quantity of sales will offset the price difference. Based on the simple math, one discount store selling desktop computer should sell what 4 computer stores could with same item, but the you should be getting more money from those 4 stores, since they generate demand and can sell stuff for higher price. The question is are you just trying to maximize market share or profits or find the middle ground ? (again you can use COO just to see what would be he/she doing in retail stores instead of you). Discount mega stores are also the best way to beat the competition with lower prices and much higher volume of sales.

I personally am not a fan of general stores, and am rather using combo of specialized and discount stores, depending on the size of the city and market value of the product. The only thing am I not sure of, if I put stores next to each other, selling same products, will this hurt sales/demand ?

[lagrelax]

Thanks. Very valuable suggestions. I tried last night and found that the volume in the purchase unit of the mega store for eggs is somehow ~10* levels. So by adding extra 2 mega stores, my over supply issues got addressed even after the staff level are higher.

Also I observed my general stores with traffic index around 45 have a margin about 20%, while the mega stores are below 10% (though traffic index is lower to ~35, as it is more difficult to find a good spot for a 4*4 store). This is somehow reconcile what you pointed out. On the other hand the mega stores has a much bigger volume, so it is a interesting topic to get an efficient combination of different types of retails. What I end up with actually is gradually increasing the number of mega stores, and close down those general stores with relative lower traffic indexes. And use those land to build real estates.

[nosedigger]

Great to hear about your progress.

I wanted to share one more thing, about megastores. You mentioned that it was hard finding good spots for them. At first I was always trying to find and buy good land plots and to plan far ahead, but then I realised when you get in the money, it's way cheaper to build your own city shopping districts. So the strategy is to buy empty plots as one big area, where the land is the cheapest. How much land, I leave to your own preference, but count how many different stores you want to cram there, add at least 8 biggest apartments with 1 hospital, 1 high school, 1 museum and 1 stadium around area. It will not take you long to figure out positioning, keep in mind to put like 2 megastores, several small special stores in center, around them apartments and around them communal buildings. Keep rent at 50%, and in 2-3 months you will have your own high traffic area. Rent is low to get tenants faster, and it's ok for profit to be 0 or minus because it will boost traffic as an offset. Also remember that I use one product per store, so I build like 4 supermarkets right next to each other and each sells different product.

[nosedigger]

I forgot one more thing, if you go to the firms info, and select retail and your company, on the far right you will see traffic and demand per store. Manual says that each specialty store raises demand, and the more you have in one city they are acting like a chain of stores, raising demand and sharing it with each other. General, Department and Discount stores don't do that, but I think they also tap in chain store demand (it's small, but every bit helps). I'm not 100% sure how, but I have 2 guesses: Discount stores are right next to specialty stores forming a small shopping center, or the discount store is only selling for an example computers, and I have 4 computer stores in the same city. Worth checking it out.

[lagrelax]

Yea. I was under an impression that having multiple sales unit selling same product is sub-optimal and so does having same retail stores close to each other. This leads to me usually having too many retail stores across the city. Now per your suggestion, a 2~3 sets of 1 purchase + 2 sale can consume the output of a large farm. This is way more convenient and easier to scale. Also totally agree with you about the development of the real estate business