Shop and office questions

Short answers to what players often ask about shops and offices. For the whole story, see Shops and Offices and services.

By themselves. Every update a shop collects production points, from the building and from each person working there, and at the top of every hour each 100 points sell one unit of each good on its shelves. Customers come on their own, so you never need to find a buyer. Each unit sold pays the customer price and adds 1 CV, on top of the CV of the money it brings in.

No. Each good has one customer price for every shop in the game: 150% of its market price, plus a small bonus while plenty of the raw material it is made from is for sale on the market. It moves with the market price, which changes at midnight. Customer prices on the Prices page shows today's figures.

No. A shop sells the same in any city, however many people live there and however many other shops there are. What decides its sales is its own points: its staff, its efficiency, a road next to it and your speciality.

• Empty shelves: there is none of its goods in your warehouse. Make them or buy them on the market.
• It has only one of its two goods: each 100 points sell one of each, so with both in stock it sells twice as many units.
• Its staff are of another profession, so they bring only their attribute points.
• It is old and its efficiency has fallen, it has no road next to it, or the amount it keeps of a good is set to 0 on its page.

From your warehouse, by itself, at every update. It keeps up to 30 of each good it sells, or less if you lower the amount under Stock inside on its page; 0 stops it selling that good. The goods can come from your own factories or from Buy goods, and goods you have locked in the warehouse stay there.

Yes, at the same customer price. But the 10% of each sale that would go to your stockpile for dividends is lost on them, and goods bought on the market earn no purchase bonus when they are sold in shops (Taxes and bonuses).

No. You can sell everything you make on the market or to the bank. Shops pay more than the market price, need no buyer and add 1 CV for every unit sold, but each one takes a building place, staff and a steady supply of goods. See The market and Selling to the bank.

Buildings that sell their staff's work to the city instead of goods, so they need no goods at all. They stand downtown and take 2 staff, best of the office's own profession, such as a Doctor in the Clinic. Depending on the round, they either sell services at the city's daily prices or take jobs from what happens in the city. They can get the road bonus, but never the speciality bonus, and they can't be upgraded.

• In some rounds, offices unlock only once your company value reaches 10,000. The Offices tab on Build shows where you are, and Offices appears in the menu once you can build one.
• Where offices take jobs, a Clinic can only be built from game day 3: its jobs come from absent staff, and nobody goes absent in their first 72 hours.
• You already have 25 buildings, or your savings don't cover the office and its land.

First make sure it is finished: a construction site needs staff to build it. Then, depending on the round:

• Where offices sell services, an office is paid once a day, at the time the Offices page shows, and only for whole billable hours. Points short of an hour wait for the next day.
• Where offices take jobs, an office is paid only when it finishes a job, and each job goes to the cheapest office with room that asks no more than the job's hidden top price. If yours shows No jobs, lower its asking price. Points it makes with no job to work on are lost, and few jobs come up in a round's first hours.

On its card on the Offices page. Where offices sell services, each one offers one of two at a time, such as Surgery or Blood sampling at the Clinic, and the whole day is billed at the price of the one it offers at billing time. Where offices take jobs, each kind of office does one kind of job, and you set its Asking price per hour, from £200 to £1,500; jobs it has already taken keep their price.

Yes, unlike factories and shops. Where offices sell services, prices are higher in cities where most buildings are factories and shops, and lower the more of them are offices. Where they take jobs, the work comes from the city: its shops want advertising, new buildings want painting and absent staff need a Clinic, so a busy city with few offices has the most. Your offices stand in your home city, so look at the figures on Map before you choose it.

Each office's card on the Offices page shows This week, Last payment and This round. Of every payment, 10% goes to your stockpile for your shareholders' dividends and the rest to your savings, and it adds to your Company Value like any money earned.