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[Sowelu]

Looks like my food factory is about to get a $4.5m cash infusion.

I don't need a store.  I'll just sell things on B2B until I have all my final-retail stuff teched up to, like, level 10, and homemade stocks of all the things.

Then I'll probably open a food court, because ice cream, desserts, and drinks.

...My next investment is going to be animal R&D, because I need my own milk and eggs.  Getting tired of buying Q0 eggs, even if their final contribution is insignificant.  Also I'm up to like TL20 cream, so it would be nice to have full vertical control.  But then I'll have to split my dairy research and...damn it.

Mix faster, dough.  :V  PIES MUST FLOW

[Paul]

I'm working on some high quality eggs right now. 24 hours until I have 1,700,000 ql22 eggs. Will have to see how the egg market is tomorrow to determine what I want to sell them at.

[dei]

I'm not making much at all with the farmer's market now, and since I don't want to play any of my other games right now I'm just going to go ahead and sell said farmer's market and go from there.

With all of the stuff being posted in the news columns and such this game is seeming more and more overwhelming. Though that might just be me needing to go out for a walk. I haven't had one in a couple days thanks to this game.

[LoSboccacc]

The price of staple crops is going up, electricity is going up...

It looks like we have a full-scale WORKER'S REVOLT on our hands!  They have taken control of the means of production!

and that's why I'm happy to have invested three days ago in a larger pump, mine and plant 

[Mr. Palau]

I'm still suprised how quickly my company has been able to expand. I don't see why people would invest in stores early in the game, I went straight to undercutting competitiors on B2B and it has made the vast majority of my profits. Yesterday, 350k in store sales, 5.43 million in B2B sales. Today I sold far more on B2B, but about hte same in the store. Networth is skyrocketing, although I was helped by the recent events the majority of networth increases has been fueled by B2B sales. I think that retail should be left until you are a very big comapny, able to afford big stores and large marketing as well as have the store filled with all the goods it can possibly sell. I have 304m^2 cafe, which toke millions to build, and it hasn't paid off nearly as fast as the increases in production.

[Sowelu]

Yeah, stores seem like endgame material to me.  If you CAN'T make a profit on B2B...probably because your stuff is so high-quality or far up the supply chain or too high volume for anyone else to eat it all up...dump it in the store.  Once you have your store full of nothing but homemade products, selling for more than you can unload it on B2B, you hit a positive-feedback loop that is not very influenced by other players' actions or trends.

And thank God for that.  Managing my store was a bitch and a half.  Groceries...over a hundred items... shudder.  I'm happy to put it off for as long as I'm able, now.

[Paul]

Well, once there is sufficient competition in the b2b markets for store owners to be able to keep a large stock of goods they'll pay off good. The main problem with stores right now is if you can't import it's rarely on the market, and having all the items in the store is required for a good profit.

The b2b market is so full of holes right now because of the big influx of players that made stores - everyone is scrambling to fill them. If everyone had scrambled to make factories it would be the opposite - nobody making a profit on b2b and the folks with stores buying their entire stock cheap off b2b and raking it in.

Take my monitors and gaming consoles. They're the only ones on the market. I have them priced high, just slightly under import prices, and they're slowly selling. Mostly in batches of a few hundred at a time. All the little electronic store owners are snagging them to try and keep their stores stocked.

[Sowelu]

Thing is, by investing in factories, you'll still have tons of production capacity for your own stores later.  Factories never go out of style.  It's basically impossible to lose by building factories (unless you're trying to make a profit on water and electricity).

[Muz]

I'm still suprised how quickly my company has been able to expand. I don't see why people would invest in stores early in the game, I went straight to undercutting competitiors on B2B and it has made the vast majority of my profits. Yesterday, 350k in store sales, 5.43 million in B2B sales. Today I sold far more on B2B, but about hte same in the store. Networth is skyrocketing, although I was helped by the recent events the majority of networth increases has been fueled by B2B sales. I think that retail should be left until you are a very big comapny, able to afford big stores and large marketing as well as have the store filled with all the goods it can possibly sell. I have 304m^2 cafe, which toke millions to build, and it hasn't paid off nearly as fast as the increases in production.

It's been one week and I make about 12M a day on B2B sales, 0 on store sales, net worth of about 34M now, growing exponentially now that I have a tech and production edge.

Stores are maybe good in the sense that you don't actually need any research. I expect that as the game grows older, you'll end up matching against multi-million 50Q products on the market, when you can only manufacture a thousand a day or so. The key to getting ahead is finding a niche. I messed up a bit investing 3 out of 6M into salt early in the game, but managed to recover by switching to other commodities.

Water and electricity isn't so bad since they're really fast turnover and the prices go down the more you manufacture. They're probably the safest to invest into because everyone buys tons of the stuff, just weak returns. Prices are going up because all the companies are growing up now and none of the big ones want to self-supply themselves.

[Mr. Palau]

Yeah I think Sowelu is right, stores are end game material. Sell to people w/ stores on B2B as you build up manufactoring capacity and then after you have great manufactoring capacity expand your stores so you can sell your own products and cut out the middle man.

[Paul]

Yeah I think Sowelu is right, stores are end game material. Sell to people w/ stores on B2B as you build up manufactoring capacity and then after you have great manufactoring capacity expand your stores so you can sell your own products and cut out the middle man.

If everyone thought like that there wouldn't be a B2B market though

[Sowelu]

Every 7 points of water qual gives me like +$1.8/bottle on my vanilla extract worth.  I would want (roughly) more than Q20 water for it to be worth producing my own, preferably approaching 30.  If I use 10m water per day, that's like $1.5m/day for it, I can compare that against how expensive it would be to build my own well and dedicated beverage plant and large R&D facility.  I think that getting up and running would take me way over a week's worth of water costs...but then, my water demands will be going up as well.  Also I think my break-even point is +$0.01 per unit of water per quality point.  So producing cheap-ass Q0 water is not a bad idea...it's just ugly because I lose my edge in the market (high Q looks nice).

Also I currently spend $3.75/bottle or something on water alone.  Which...okay, honestly?  That's trivial.  1/25th of my final price.

Right then.  As soon as I'm spending $10m/day on water, I'm going to drop beverage research (I only use it for better strawberry ice cream anyway) and flip it over to water research, and make a lifetime's worth of strawberry concentrate while I build my enormous well.  I'll have to see how it goes.  I am a little worried about limited real estate though.  I mean...I'm going to be building a pasture soon and then start butchering my own goods, and I already have uh, plantation, orchard, food, bakery, dairy, ice cream.

[Mr. Palau]

Every 7 points of water qual gives me like +$1.8/bottle on my vanilla extract worth.  I would want (roughly) more than Q20 water for it to be worth producing my own, preferably approaching 30.  If I use 10m water per day, that's like $1.5m/day for it, I can compare that against how expensive it would be to build my own well and dedicated beverage plant and large R&D facility.  I think that getting up and running would take me way over a week's worth of water costs...but then, my water demands will be going up as well.  Also I think my break-even point is +$0.01 per unit of water per quality point.  So producing cheap-ass Q0 water is not a bad idea...it's just ugly because I lose my edge in the market (high Q looks nice).

Also I currently spend $3.75/bottle or something on water alone.  Which...okay, honestly?  That's trivial.  1/25th of my final price.

Right then.  As soon as I'm spending $10m/day on water, I'm going to drop beverage research (I only use it for better strawberry ice cream anyway) and flip it over to water research, and make a lifetime's worth of strawberry concentrate while I build my enormous well.  I'll have to see how it goes.  I am a little worried about limited real estate though.  I mean...I'm going to be building a pasture soon and then start butchering my own goods, and I already have uh, plantation, orchard, food, bakery, dairy, ice cream.

Sounds like you ma need to start a new corporation.

Yeah I think Sowelu is right, stores are end game material. Sell to people w/ stores on B2B as you build up manufactoring capacity and then after you have great manufactoring capacity expand your stores so you can sell your own products and cut out the middle man.

If everyone thought like that there wouldn't be a B2B market though

true, unless you needed a good to manufacture another good that you needed for your store, but couldn't make the first good by yourself. Then you would be forced to buy from others.

[dei]

I'm loving the fact that the stuff I had originally imported before the price hikes is selling to players. I made enough to expand my factories and my agricultural research centers. Now that I've put the last bit of that on the market though, I'm just going to spend my time making an hours worth of product, selling half of it, and then making an hour's worth more.

I'm back up to around $1,920,000 since I last checked, and if I continue to make around $50,000 to $100,000 an hour while making my goods and selling them on the B2B Market I might have enough for a second confectionery or food research and development in a few hours or so. I don't have anything to do tonight other than dinner, shower, and Big Bang Theory anyways, so it works out pretty well for me to keep on doing this sort of thing.

[Paul]

Make larger batches for decreased costs and more profit. The game is called Economies of Scale, after all.