No Offer Cheap: Don't Give Away My Store!

[J. M. Pescado]

Sales employees no longer give away your store by using Offer Cheap. Seriously, if a sales employee did this in real life, it'd come out of his paycheck or he'd be fired.


nooffercheap.zip

No Offer Cheap! TS2OFBp0 - TS2OFBp1
Made by: Flying Fish Systems (J. M. Pescado)

Congratulations to: Draklixa!

FEATURES:
Employee salespeople are no longer allowed to give away your store by lowering
your prices. What the hell kind of salesmanship is that, anyway?

COMPATIBILITY:
Compatible with all FFS hacks. Tested for TS2OFBp0 - TS2OFBp1.

SIDE EFFECTS:
May cause computer damage, incontinence, explosion of user's head, coma, death,
and/or halitosis.

WARNING:
Do not open, crush, dispose of in fire, put in backwards, short-circuit, or mix
with non-awesome hacks - may explode, leak, or catch fire, resulting in injury
and/or death.

[Motoki]

This sounds useful. But just to be clear, this only removes sims from doing it autonomously, however if I still want the owner or a manager to do it I can still manually have them offer cheap, correct?

[veilchen]

I'm thinking the same thing. After all, if a store owner does it, it should be okay, it's her/his business after all. Anyway that one is a good start :D

I seem to be having difficulties with employee salespeople in general. The customers often seem to resent being approached by an employee, while being approached by the owner earns loyalty points/sales.
It doesn't matter what badge the employee has by the way. It happens from no badge all the way through gold.

[J. M. Pescado]

This sounds useful. But just to be clear, this only removes sims from doing it autonomously, however if I still want the owner or a manager to do it I can still manually have them offer cheap, correct?

Correct. The action is still available, but employees will revert to Basic Sell instead of attempting to use it. You may still direct a manager or owner to use it.

[Motoki]

Yes I have issues with the employee sales people too. The AI could be a little bit better for it. Like if they try to sell to someone and the customer has a negative reaction maybe they should not try to sell to them again right away. DUH

[Ruann]

Yeah.  And they should only try Hard Sell on people they are moderately friendly with.  Instead, I had Dirk Dreamer hard-selling every random Townie who walked into the shop, despite him not knowing a single one of them.  Obviously, none of them liked his idea.

So he got fired.   

[TheCheat]

This could be useful to me, but oddly enough, it doesn't matter. The "Offer At" Sales interaction never works correctly in my game, no matter who uses it.

If my Owner uses it, the Buy bar on the affected customer will rise and then fall back to its original level about 5 seconds later. Even if the interaction would have made a sale (where you hear the "ding"), the customer never picks the item up and ultimately the bar falls back to near-empty. The same thing happens when any Employees use it on customers.

[Ancient Sim]

It never occurred to me that employees would use it, I just assign them to sales and leave them to it.  Most of the time they seem to use Dazzle.  I can't tell what they're using unless it's Dazzle anyway, as it's the only one I recognise the animation for.  There doesn't seem any other way of working out which technique they're using.

[Thraxwhirl]

Yes I have issues with the employee sales people too. The AI could be a little bit better for it. Like if they try to sell to someone and the customer has a negative reaction maybe they should not try to sell to them again right away. DUH

AGREEEED x a million there, my friend. I had a Sales Employee with a Gold Badge in Sales hassle a customer all the way down to five red marks in the space of about 5(real) minutes or less. Unbelievable. The Customer stormed out and will undoubtedly NOT be returning.

What made me really annoyed was that there were other people she could've picked on.

Having driven one customer away though, that's exactly what she then went and did.

Total madness.

[anelca]

i can work it out easily enough once its happened....by the red minus signs over everyones head 

[TheCheat]

No one has experienced the problem I mentioned above?

[Thraxwhirl]

No, I confess I haven't had that problem.

I have other bugs - for example everytime I attempt to Make Toys or Robots it completely freezes the game - but I don't have the bug you mentioned, TheCheat.

[J. M. Pescado]

Yes I have issues with the employee sales people too. The AI could be a little bit better for it. Like if they try to sell to someone and the customer has a negative reaction maybe they should not try to sell to them again right away. DUH

The AI could be a lot better, yes. The odds of negative reaction are somewhat wonky at best, though, since customers often show up REAAAAALLY surly, and just get along really badly with your sims, often for no perceptible reason. I suspect it's a unidirectional chemistry issue: Townies often exhibit sim-to-sim chemistry that will not manifest on your sim panel at all because townies are designed to always be "available", so their gender preferences do not affect whether or not they receive chemistry boosts. Of course, if your sim is NOT romantically inclined towards the townie's gender, they will not show bolts or X-bolts, and receive no adjustment, whereas the townie will. Wonky stuff, really.

As for the interaction choices, well, let's just say the interactional choices are nearly uniformly bad, since they choose far too many non-Dazzle actions, and Dazzle is the only action that will actually sell anything most of the time!

Business Runs You! will push the AutoSoc Sales routines onto your gold-badge salespeople instead, likely suppressing their urge to sell in stupid ways.

[Motoki]

As for the interaction choices, well, let's just say the interactional choices are nearly uniformly bad, since they choose far too many non-Dazzle actions, and Dazzle is the only action that will actually sell anything most of the time!

Business Runs You! will push the AutoSoc Sales routines onto your gold-badge salespeople instead, likely suppressing their urge to sell in stupid ways.

But doesn't that drastically lower their needs and put them in a crappy mood, or does your strategy of being best friends with them keep them from bailing regardless of how low their motives get from the Dazzles?

[KellyQ]

[
The AI could be a lot better, yes. The odds of negative reaction are somewhat wonky at best, though, since customers often show up REAAAAALLY surly, and just get along really badly with your sims, often for no perceptible reason.

As someone who used to work in retail, I think this sounds just like real life!

[J. M. Pescado]

But doesn't that drastically lower their needs and put them in a crappy mood, or does your strategy of being best friends with them keep them from bailing regardless of how low their motives get from the Dazzles?

Platinum aspiration = +300 mood. Since mood is normally -100 (dead) to 100 (maxmotives + full environment), even if your sim was practically dead, he'd still have a mood of 200. Nonplatinum sims are terrible workers and don't perform well either in regular jobs or OFB jobs. Period.

Besides, Dazzles are the only thing that will sell your products. Without it, you may as well not bother trying, nothing is going to sell. The best friends + platinum approach pretty much buffers you against everything from abusive work conditions to crappy wages.

[Motoki]

So you hire other playables then? I don't think townies can get platinum can they? At least not without hacks.

[Ruann]

So you hire other playables then? I don't think townies can get platinum can they? At least not without hacks.

Two Words:  Dream Dates

[TheCheat]

Townie Aspiration Level does not change at all while on dates. You can watch this by playing a date through its entirety and just before it ends, use Debug Mode to make the townie selectable. You'll see that the Aspiration Level sits at neutral pretty much all the time. It will only change once the townie is moved into a household and made playable somewhere in the neighborhood.

[Sarahzsmyl]

Y'all never cease to amaze me.  I couldn't figure out the point of selling all your items below profit, and then my sales staff is doing on their own!  UGH!  No wonder my cash flow was always negative.

Thanks, Dude!

[Marvin Kosh]

The wholsesale discounts make it easier to make a margin on any goods that have to be supplied, so at that point you could justify dropping a price category if it makes a sale.  But, and that's the point of this hack, selling cheap is a call you want to make yourself and not leave to a crappy AI that spams its sales socials without any kind of business sense

[witch]

This could be useful to me, but oddly enough, it doesn't matter. The "Offer At" Sales interaction never works correctly in my game, no matter who uses it.

If my Owner uses it, the Buy bar on the affected customer will rise and then fall back to its original level about 5 seconds later. Even if the interaction would have made a sale (where you hear the "ding"), the customer never picks the item up and ultimately the bar falls back to near-empty. The same thing happens when any Employees use it on customers.

I noticed that last night in a home business. Given other comments, I wondered if the success of the interaction depended on relationship, but logically 'sell cheaper' should depend least on relationship.

But mine appeared to be malfunctioning, I tried with family members and owner. I didn't have any employed sale staff. The basic sell works fine, so does dazzle, offer at cheap causes a drop in the customer sales indicator, I did not see a successful interaction. Sometimes I even got the gold swirly thing, then the bar would drop down to almost nothing.

[Marvin Kosh]

I get that uneasy feeling that we'll find out that the lowering of the buy bar is some kind of feature, not a bug.  Selling at a lower price does mean that you're more likely to get a Loyalty star, so perhaps as a means of balancing this positive effect it was decided that there should be the possibility that the customer walks away without filling their buy bar, thus wasting the sales social.

[witch]

Thus making the sims illogical again, as IRL you are more likely to buy if offered a cheaper price. That is the basis for the whole marketing industry of course; the lies they tell to make us believe we are paying a cheaper price.