Food and shops
Shops and restaurants don’t bring people into your tower. They earn from the people who are already there. An office worker grabbing lunch, a hotel guest out for dinner, a family picking up groceries on the way home: that is where a shop’s money comes from. Build them for a crowd you already have, and they pay handsomely. Build them in an empty tower and they sit idle.
How a shop earns
Section titled “How a shop earns”Every hour a shop is open and people can reach it, it takes in a share of the tower’s spending. Roughly:
- Each office worker and each hotel guest is good for about $30 a day.
- Each resident of a condo or apartment spends about a third of that.
- A working Metro station brings in visitors from outside and adds a quarter on top. Plenty of recycling adds a little more.
The shops in reach split that spending between them by how much each can serve. Too many shops for too few people, and each gets a thin slice.
A few things change a day’s takings:
| Far from a lobby | A shop more than two floors from a lobby or sky lobby takes half as much. Keep shops near lobbies. A tall lobby counts from its top story, so the floor just above it is close enough. A working Metro counts too: its riders get off on the station’s middle floor, so shops within two floors of it do full business. |
| Rain | About one day in seven it rains, and fewer people go out: takings fall by half (by less with a Metro), and fast food suffers most. |
| Weekends | In Classic, restaurants, fast food and shops all do better on the weekend. In Modern it depends on the kind: restaurants, bars and boutiques do better, fast food and the daycare do worse. |
| Open hours | A shop only earns while it is open. Each one’s hours are in its fact box. |
The shop’s card shows how many customers came and what it made yesterday, so you can see which ones pull their weight.
The people you see inside a fast food, restaurant or food hall are its customers: everyone who walked or rode in and hasn’t left yet. It draws empty when it opens and fills as diners arrive, so a quiet one looks quiet. The card’s Customers line counts the same people. Retail shops, boutiques and the other shops draw a full house while they are open.
Classic As in the 1994 game, a new fast food, restaurant or shop counts 10 visitors on its first day, and the count climbs by 5 to 15 a day as word gets around, until it tops out (a little higher on weekends). Those visitors count toward your population.
Shops and restaurants are noisy. Offices within 11 tiles on the same floor hear them, and homes and hotel rooms within 21 tiles. A lobby between them stops the noise. The best place for a row of shops is a lobby floor or the floor next to one, with no homes on it.
Fast Food
Section titled “Fast Food”Cheap, small and open from early morning until late. Fast food lives on office workers’ lunches. Each one opens as one of these:
Restaurants
Section titled “Restaurants”A sit-down restaurant earns more per customer and opens for lunch and again for dinner, which is when the hotel crowd arrives.
Retail shops
Section titled “Retail shops”Food Hall Modern
Section titled “Food Hall Modern”A whole row of counters under one roof, open all day. It costs more than a restaurant and serves more people.
Boutique Bay Modern
Section titled “Boutique Bay Modern”Clinic Modern
Section titled “Clinic Modern”A clinic is leased, like an office: it pays rent every quarter instead of earning from customers, and it is quiet.
When there aren’t enough shops
Section titled “When there aren’t enough shops”Office workers, residents and hotel guests all want somewhere to eat and shop that they can get to. If the shops they can reach could serve fewer than half of them, their ratings are held down. In Modern, a cinema, party hall or aquatic center they can reach counts toward that too, though seats can’t replace shops altogether. See Tenant ratings.
See also
Section titled “See also”- Venues for the cinema, party hall and Modern’s entertainment
- People and traffic for when the crowds come
- Money for where shop income shows in your books