Retail Reloaded!
We love to cover game-changing mods here at Sims Community to make your playing experience more immersive and today we’re covering another gameplay improvement mod by Carl, talented modder and guide writer!
This new mod is called Retail Reloaded and it’s main purpose is to make running a retail business with Get To Work a smoother experience! Since this mod tweaks existing gameplay, we thought the best way to show you what the mod does is by playing with a retail business ourselves and sharing our experience with it.
When I first installed this mod, I did wonder what was so wrong with Get To Work’s retail system that it required an overhaul. I had always enjoyed the retail portion of Get To Work for the most part and didn’t usually experience any serious trouble with it. However, I am a huge fan of Carl’s and was very interested to see how he was able to streamline the retail experience. As usual, he didn’t disappoint!
We quickly randomised a Sim and gave him some funds to purchase the Paddywack’s Emporium retail lot in Magnolia Promenade. Then it was time to hire an employee to help out and open up the business! It didn’t take us very long at all to notice a huge difference in the way things functioned! Most notably, how the customers behaved.
Customers were overall more self-sufficient and less needy. Typically when running a retail business, you’d have to baby the customers and work for every sale. Customers were very unlikely to buy anything without you or an employee chatting them up to promote your stock. While a nice idea in theory to challenge players, it was a bit exhausting. It took a very long time to convince a single customer to purchase something, leaving you too busy to help any other customers or take care of other retail duties. While there are retail perks to help speed things along, it never quite felt like enough of a bonus to be worth the points you spent on them. That wasn’t the case here. Carl’s Retail Reloaded mod made customers much more likely to make purchases on their own and their sales bars increased more quickly. Our Sim could still talk up customers to make sales and earn retail points of course but it felt like less of a burden to do so.
At first, we were underwhelmed by our employee, who seemed to do nothing she was told no matter how many times we assigned her a task or scolded her for slacking off. All she did was sit outside doing her university coursework and ignoring her job completely. That’s when it occurred to us that maybe hiring a university student maybe wasn’t the best idea so we fired her and replaced her with Eric Lewis. Eric was a much more diligent employee, taking care of his assigned duties in a timely manner and staying focused on his tasks. We attribute this to the mod as well but we definitely recommend avoiding hiring university students as retail employees.
It was amazing to us how just these small changes in autonomy alone made such a big impact on our overall retail experience. Things ran much more smoothly, our Sim could choose to be as involved or as hands-off with the customers as we wanted him to be, we made more sales and restocked more efficiently thanks to having employees who actually stayed focused on the tasks they were given. Even though we wouldn’t say the retail system was bad before, this mod still does a great job at giving it a subtle but effective polish to make it even better!
I went into this mod thinking retail stores didn’t need any big improvements but what I underestimated was how small improvements can have a big impact on my overall playing experience! I highly recommend this mod to any aspiring business owners out there!
Carl’s Retail Reloaded mod is currently in early access but you can follow him on Patreon to receive updates on the mod’s progress and when it will be released to the public!
