Big Ambitions Gym Equipment List: Prices and Where to Buy

Gym is the business players open for the wrong reason — it looks cheap to stock — and then abandon for the right one. The equipment list explains both halves of that.

Where Gym Equipment Is Sold

The trade supplier for workout machines is Essentials Appliances in Lower Manhattan, the same shop that sells security cameras and coat checks. A handful of smaller items — fitball, gym mat, kettlebells, treadmill, pull-up bar — are also stocked at IKA BOHAG, the home-furniture store, because they double as home happiness items. If you are fitting out an actual gym, one trip to Essentials covers everything; see where to buy for the rest of that shop’s catalog.

Full Equipment List

Customer capacity is the number that matters. Every workout item serves 2 customers per hour; a Steam forum regular summarised the whole business model as “each piece is 2 customers per hour, so 15 pieces is 30 per hour”. The building’s own capacity is the ceiling — a C2 gym at 30 needs fifteen items to reach it.

Two prices are disputed. The community wiki’s furniture table lists the Treadmill at $3,800 and the Pull-Up Bar at $700; the BiggerAmbitions fan database lists $5,250 and $280. The game has been rebalanced repeatedly and neither source dates its figure, so both are shown. Everything else matches across the two.

The cheap end of that table is the interesting part. A kettlebell serves the same 2 customers per hour as a $3,500 bench. If your only goal is reaching building capacity, a rack of kettlebells and gym mats does it for a few hundred dollars — the expensive machines are for interior score and appearance, not throughput.

What a Gym Needs to Open

Beyond workout items, the wiki’s Gym page lists the fixed requirements, and the fan database’s business sheet agrees on the staff:

The Fitness Planning Board is the employee station: a Gym Trainer works there, and the trainer’s skill level sets the customer service score of the business. Note that lockers and showers each carry a capacity of 10 — a 30-capacity gym wants three of each, not one, for the same reason a supermarket wants more than one register. The 1.0 patch 3672 fixed a bug where gym customers did not use showers, so on current builds the shower is genuinely load-bearing.

Decorative Gym Bars ($420 and $470 at Essentials) carry no capacity; they are interior-score items only.

What a Gym Sells

Since EA 0.11 “The Workshop Awakens”, gyms sell Soda and Energy Drinks at the drinks fridge without needing an extra employee — the update singled out gyms as one of the weakest businesses and added the drinks specifically to make them viable early-game income. The fan database lists the gym’s products as exactly those two plus the Gym Cover Charge service. Energy drinks come from the same wholesalers that supply supermarkets, liquor stores, nightclubs and gift shops.

Why Gyms Still Earn Little

The Steam forum verdict has been consistent for years: gyms are “absolutely trash for money making”, and the standard advice to a player asking how to set one up was “don’t”. The structural reason is in the tables above. Income per customer is a cover charge plus a drink, throughput is capped at 2 per item, and the mandatory fixtures cost more than $6,000 before a single machine. Compare that with a jewelry store, where a single showcase moves high-value stock. EA 0.11’s drinks bonus narrowed the gap but did not close it.

Where gyms do earn their keep is as a happiness source for your own character: the boxing bag, workout bench, squats station and treadmill all grant the Exercised boost at the gym, with the same boost available at home from a treadmill, pull-up bar or gym mat. For how that plays into your day, see employee happiness and the ranking of all businesses in business types.