I managed a place in the top three!! That's so awesome! I'm quite a bit behind the first and second places, but I'm still excited! Considering I didn't make it into the millions, I doubt anyone's too interested in seeing my strategy, but I'll write about it without going too in-depth.
I've actually never run a store until this challenge. I did a bit of planning beforehand. I didn't want to bother selling any collectibles that came from digging up rocks. You never really know what you'll end up getting, and most of those collectibles are so cheap that I thought it wasn't even worth putting the time in to sell them. I decided to run the store for each of the six weeks, selling mixology drinks, gourmet cooked dishes, microscope prints, woodwork items, paintings, and telescope prints.
My sims were Gina and Darren. I created Gina to excel in activities that required skills enhanced by the focused mood. I gave her the traits genius, loves the outdoors, and cheerful. Darren would be used for skills enhanced by inspiration, so he had creative, loves the outdoors, and cheerful. I chose love the outdoors because I planned to have both their home and store outside, so it would tack on some easy happiness. Cheerful for pretty much the same reason--tack on some happiness and make it easier to get very focused, very inspired, or very confident.
The plan was to alternate the objects sold so that while one sim was making objects to be sold immediately, the other sim would be building skill and building up a stock of items to sell later in the challenge. It didn't alternate exactly, but it still worked okay for me. The store also had one employee through the whole six weeks. I'm not sure why I kept her. Even when she had full sales skill, satisfaction, and ethic, she sucked at her job. She mostly stood around and had idle conversation. Despite being praised when she did so, she didn't have a lot of sales interactions with customers and she never moved fast enough to ring up any sales.
Week 1: Sold mixology drinks, mostly Prose and Props and Amygdelights. They had a pretty good pricetag and could be made with no mixology skill. Plus early on I had some assistance in making Darren and Gina inspired and focused. Unfortunately I didn't think to write down the profit I made each week. Darren did most of the drink making, with Gina taking a break from her woodworking and customer service to make Amygdelights. Because drinks were so quick to make, it was easy for Darren to build up his cooking and gourmet cooking skills to prepare for the next week.
Week 2: Gourmet meals. Mostly sold Baked Alaska, because it sold for the most simoleons without attempting to work with ambrosia. My sims made quite a bit of money this week with each group dish of ambrosia selling for $2000+.
Week 3: Microscope prints. Because the prints don't have any quality rating and analyzing slides is always pretty fast, Darren and Gina were both able to work on this. Darren analyzed slides from plants around the neighborhood. Gina used both plants and fossils, not bothering with crystals for very long when I found that the crystal prints didn't sell for much.
Week 4: Woodwork items. By this point, Gina had managed to reach level 7 Handiness, so I had her get the blueprint for the mascot statue and pump out a load of them. When they had excellent quality, some of them sold for over $7000 with the highest price mark-up. I also had her make some bathtubs when her skill was high enough, and they sold for even more. Around this point in time, Gina and Darren both had the Never Weary and Marketable awards. I packed up Gina and Darren's home and made them a home at the store since I had accrued a pretty big sum of retail funds. Everything except the bathroom was still outdoors.
Week 5: Through all of these weeks Darren has been working on his painting skill and collecting paintings that were worth a good bit of money. He mostly sold small abstract paintings. This week brought in the most funds by far, with some of Darren's paintings selling for over $11,000 each.
Week 6: I wasn't sure what to do for this week before starting the challenge. As I said before, digging up rocks just didn't work for me. Fishing could make some good money if I put time into the skill off of the store lot, but I didn't want to do that. I considered mathematical diagrams until I saw how cheaply they sold. Didn't feel like putting the money and time into a rocket, and even then you never know if you'll get aliens, space rocks, or nothing at all. I decided to use telescope prints, which took a little time to come across, but thankfully weren't too time-consuming. Gina's higher logic skill and ability to use the "Search for Truth" interaction helped a lot.
And that's about it! The challenge got tedious sometimes, but it was still fun! Better yet, after four customer deaths in the store (three occurring at once!) Grim became quite the dedicated customer! I saw him nearly every day!
