Big Ambitions: What to Sell in Each Business

“What should I sell?” is really three questions stacked on top of each other, and answering them in the wrong order is why shops end up half-empty with the wrong goods.

Question 1: What Does the Business Type Support?

Each business line has its own product catalog, and the appliance or display fixture you place is what determines which goods can sit in it. Some examples from the fixture data:

Note what that Cash Register row is telling you: the register itself consumes paper bags as a supply, and it needs a customer-service employee assigned before it functions. Running out of paper bags stops checkout. It is the most commonly missed consumable in the game.

Question 2: What Does This Neighborhood Want?

MarketInsider answers this per district. For each product it publishes demand, the lowest market price on the street, the import price index and how many businesses already provide it. It also carries the citizen breakdown — working, middle and upper class share — which is why the same product supports a different price and a different volume in Murray Hill than in Hell’s Kitchen.

The pattern to look for is high demand, low provider count. That is an underserved product in that district, and it is worth more than a high-demand product that ten other shops already stock. Pricing strategy follows from the same panel — see pricing guide.

Question 3: How Much Can You Actually Display?

This is the one people skip. Every fixture carries its own customer capacity, and the building’s customer capacity is a ceiling rather than a promise. An M1 retail unit tops out at 75 customers per hour, but only if you have placed enough capacity-bearing fixtures to serve 75.

So “what to sell” is bounded by “what you have somewhere to put”. A supermarket with the widest item list in the game and four shelves is not a supermarket.

1.0 made this visible: store items now show their customer capacity and any placement requirements — such as needing to sit on a cabinet — directly in the catalog.

The Product Panel

The Product Panel ($500 from AJ Pederson & Son) is a fixture players search for by name without always knowing what it does. It is part of how products are presented and managed in-store. Alongside it, product signs come in hanging rectangular, hanging square and wall variants — these are the signage layer for a shop floor.

By Business Type

Supermarket — the widest catalog in the game: fresh food, frozen food, drinks, baked goods, household items. Its strength is breadth, which means its weakness is purchasing workload. This is the business most improved by a warehouse behind it.

Gift Shop — a short, cheap list. Cheap Gift and Expensive Gift are distinct items, and gifts double as something you need for personal objectives, so there is a reason to keep some in stock beyond selling them.

Clothing Store — the sourcing puzzle. Clothing splits by quality (cheap / expensive), style (classic / modern) and target (male / female), which is eight distinct product lines from different suppliers. This is why “which wholesale dealer has clothing items” is one of the most-searched supply questions for this game. See suppliers and importers.

Jewelry Store — few items, very high value, heaviest security requirement in the game. Cheap and expensive jewelry are separate lines, with cut and polished gems as the manufacturing inputs behind them.

Electronics Store — phones, smartwatches, computers, headphones, speakers. High unit value, and every one of them is manufacturable if you eventually build an electronics factory.

Liquor Store — beer, wine, whiskey, gin, tequila and mixed drinks. Everything here can be produced in your own factory, which makes it one of the tidiest vertical integrations available. See factory recipes.

Fast Food Restaurant — burgers, hotdogs, fries, pizza, salad. Products come from on-site machines, so the menu is decided by which appliances you buy, not by what you order in.

Book Store — novels, picture books, technical manuals, motivational books, limited editions. Cheap to stock, low unit prices. Books are also a documented happiness item for your own character.

The Restocking Loop

Once you know what to sell, the mechanics of keeping it there are a separate system: wholesalers for walk-in supply, importers with weekly delivery limits for bulk, a warehouse with a logistics manager and delivery driver to distribute, and repeating orders that maintain a target stock level. That whole chain is in warehouse and deliveries.

1.0 improved one specific pain point here: inventory now distributes more evenly across stores rather than the first station taking everything.