So how many different kinds of businesses are there?
I know that you can charge people money to be on the lot for a certain amount of hours and you can sell items and have a restaurant but is that it?! Can you sell clothes from the clothing rack? Can you charge people for makeovers? Can you sell video games and magazines?! I've had OFB for almost my entire life and I've always had the same type of businesses, and if I try doing something different, it fails.

So if any one has any business ideas or tips please share

You can have just about anything you want. Yes, you can sell clothes from clothing racks (and can use the "suggest outfit" option so that the customer buys a specific outfit and changes into it once purchased). You can sell video games and magazines from the racks. You can sell snacks from vending machines. You can sell makeovers. You can run a restaurant. You can have a grocery store. A car dealership. Heck, you can have a brothel. Pretty much anything you can imagine, you can make. Particularly if you use mods.

If you are willing to download things you can have any kind of business as you can think of pretty much.
With the vanilla game you can indeed sell clothes, makeovers ,magazines and pets.

I have A Health Clinic, a Fire Station, Police Station, Town hall with a court room, a newspaper office, a museum. You name it and I have probably done it. I've even had a funeral parlor that sold a corpse.

So you tell us what you want and we should be able to help.

When you say it fails, do you mean it loses so much money that the owner has to close it?

OFB is my favorite. Every family in my game has a business of some kind. Anything in the catalog can be sold. I have a furniture store, electronics store, clothing store, gym, career center, bank, museum, movie theatre and so on. Even bake goods and fish can be sold. I have a deli, bakery, sub shop, fish market, meat store, produce store, and so on.

Any store you have in your hometown can be done in game. Just recently I read a thread here about someone having a thrift store. I haven't added it to my game yet, but will soon.

Oooooohh what are some mods you guys suggest? And I'm about to open a clothing store right now c:

I'm curious to know how you set those up and work them?

When I try clicking on the rack it only says "Try on"

EDIT: My idiotic brain was able to figure it out -_-

Did you mark the rack for sale? (It does have to be set for sale.) And did you try having your owner click on the rack while the business was open?

You can do a clothing store without mods, but there are OFB mods around to make running a store easier.

First I always use the Customer Selector from MATY. With that I can set the type of business it is which helps more for certain types of businesses. For example if you are playing a restaurant it makes sense if the customer arrives hungry and for a retail business if they arrive wanting to shop. So for a clothes shop I would set it as a retail business.

Next I place the Business runs you sign someplace out of the way. I don't use many of it's functions but it has a handy function of being able to toggle open and close without making your sim walk over to a sign and turn it. Very useful say if you place your sign in an area that the sim can't get to such as up on the front window above a foundation. There is also the 'bugger off' function which lets you tell annoying customers to... well bugger off.

If you are feel you are not good yet at managing a store and have little cash you could get an automatic till from simlogical. This way your poor sim doesn't have to hire workers, deal with irritate customers, just sell and restock. I don't normally use it but it's handy in certain situations. Right now I am using it at my health clinic and saying the customers are being bulk billed (if you have that in your country)

No more complaining. I got that mostly to stop sims who were over as guests at home businesses would not complain. The shops closed and your over for dinner, it's not nice of you to complain about those plates. It had the nice benefit that now no customers complain anywhere.

Make sure to always start with prices set at cheap until you have some levels. Do not hire people if you can help it/have enough cash. No mod needed for those.

There are other OFB mods, I don't find I need them.


The clinic, police station and fire station are home businesses.

The clinic is a bit convoluted to play, I doubt many people would want to do it. But anyways... I have a ticket machine set up there and my Dr in her office. First sim to buy a ticket get moved into the office. It simply would not work unless I locked the door to all sims. In her office is a shelf of things for sale. Glasses, a working health tonic, pregnancy test, deco pills and a first aid kit. What the sim decides to think about buying is what they are there for. I then make them selectable and have them sit on the chair and talk to the DR or relax on the bed, look at the eye chart or do a pregnancy test. Depending on that I tell them to add to the bag whatever it was that they need. Deselect them and move them back to the waiting room. They can leave via the automatic till. I just added in pcsims DR stuff which is fun, I tried it out in my test hood (without the NPC files just the objects) only my Dr needs 5 mechanical to use it, and she is at 4 now.

My police Station and Fire station has a drivable vehicle and each one is in that career track. I'm still setting this hood up, so there working up the career is their training. Once they get to the job description I want I will toss in the job stopinator. The fire station sells fire alarms, the toy fire truck and safety books. The police station is similar and sells burglar alarms, safety books and a toy police car. Later on I will have them give talks at the education centre, move to a larger station which can have a jail. There is one cell only right now.

The Town Hall is an owned business. Downstairs there is a newspaper office and I send my reporter there to write articles on Monique's computer. He also takes photos around town. Upstairs is the court room. I still have to make and hire a judge for that. That uses some of the PC sims courtroom items. I just grab again whoever buys tickets first. So first on the lot and you are on trial for some kind of misdemeanor. Second on the lot and you are a witness.

I didn't know that you could sell clothes! So, setting the rack for sale makes customers able to buy clothes?

I want to run a resale shop where neighborhood residents sell the owners their items and the store owners resell them, but how would I either sell the items to someone, or transfer them from their inventory and then transfer funds to simulate a sale? Thanks.

Yes simply set the racks for sale and sims will buy clothes off them.

With my thrift shop that sells second hand items I stop anyone walking by the house and see what is their inventory. I have that in a older hood with townies and they always come with junk. I roughly work out 10% or what I think would be enough recompense and give it to them via the wallet controller. I then sell everything at cheap in her shop. if the sim has a huge lot of junk the transfer vase is the best way to do that. http://modthesims.info/d/228385 The wallet controller http://modthesims.info/d/292893. I also use Control this sim to easily select the sims I want to rob buy things off.

When running a clothing store, if you don't suggest outfit, do they actually buy anything? I mean I see them browsing and going to the till to pay and everything, but when you go to the customers house, do they actually get something new in the wardrobe? I've never seen it and rarely bother with clothing stores for this reason.

No, I've had non-controlled playables shop and buy at a clothing store and, subsequently, got nothing new in their wardrobe. Townies don't have wardrobes, so obviously they won't get anything. So, they're basically buying nothing. I tend to ban playables from owned clothing shops when I have them, because pretty much my only purpose in having them is to change townie outfits while having the shop owner earn his/her living.

For clarity's sake, I should add that if you send a playable to an owned clothing shop, they can shop there as normal and will come home with whatever outfit(s) they bought. If they visit the shop when you're not playing them, though, they won't.

At other kinds of shops they do though. So if you have a pet shop and load up a family who went and bought a pet while you were playing the shop, they will get a pop-up window asking if you would like to keep the pet. Also all the stuff they buy that can go into inventory will show up there. Clothing is different.

If you suggest an outfit the sim, if they accept, will go look at the clothing rack and if they buy you will get a window allowing you to pick the item. It tends to work best if they feel friendly towards you otherwise they will decline right away.

I play a similar game to joandsarah77, and also run a medical clinic and a town hall. PCsims stuff are really great for adding extra content and they can be found in the sims 2 graveyard. Also Jessa Sims has kindly provided a link to the courthouse items which unfortunately went missing from the graveyard.

Don't forget the hairdressing salon, (ofb provides a chair), bakery shop, car dealership, estate agents and regular stuff like that. All the services in my town will eventually be run as owned business. I got bookshop, farm, grocers market, brothel, internet cafe, hospital, prison, church grounds and graveyard.... etc.. Eventually very few sims will be left in normal maxis careers. I'm working on providing freelance services like architect and nannies by importing sims in and using simwardrobe checkbook or the wallet to pay for the services. If anyone has any ideas on the science track I'd be very interested.

It's much easier to ask, what business and services can't you run in the sims 2.

This suggest outfit has opened a million doors for me! I also got a chair so sometimes I can change their hurrrr and mkup to make them beautiful

P.S. I got a good review on my clothing store, AND I'm too level three, so I'm pretty sure Ellis Maclay will be very successful in her business ventures of course with the help of maxmotives

I used to flick through the yellow pages to get ideas for my sim businesses!

Sounds cool. Where did you get the vehicles and the toys and safety books from?

Can you write articles other than restaurant reviews or does the Town Hall have a food obsession? XD

Lol, there are different articles. I can't say anything that newsworthy has happened yet. I break down and one wedding.

Fire Truck http://modthesims.info/d/176796
Police car http://modthesims.info/d/100380
The fire truck is from extracted OFB toys, the police car is from Simslice, but not from there... you know booty.

The books are just books. I will have actual written novels for those, just haven't got there yet.

There are a couple of threads on MTS about the types of businesses you can open. as well as community lots in general for your hood.

Here's one list in this thread:

http://modthesims.info/showthread.p...25#startcomment

And another:

http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=523332

And I'm pretty darn sure people can come up with more, as more creators come up with great content.

I have a police station - two of my CAS sims work there along with Sandy Bruty who is the vice cop.

My most profitable business is a garden centre. It sells, well, garden stuff: plants, shrubs, small trees, benches, bird tables and so on. Sims love it. I've recently added a small campsite with a fishing lake and barbecue area, so far that seems quite popular too.

ETA: I've also built a comedy club, which makes a nice alternative for evening out.

I had no idea about all the different options for businesses. The bookstore for example was a complete surprise to me. I have since had one of my sims make and run a bookstore.

The restaurant seems to be the hardest. My celebrity chef owns one but it seems to be a money pit at the start. Plus staff quitting even though they have a green circle above their heads, and hiring a bar person even though nobody uses it. That will be getting sold soon.

Thanks for this thread though. It's given me some excellent ideas.
I think my chef will be setting up a fresh produce grocery. Assuming that is possible?

That garden centre seems like a really cool idea.

The fresh produce grocery is certainly possible, even under vanilla rules; however, if you want to make a real go of it, you'd do well to read this thread:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=542644
And consider using the mods, fixes, and suggestions therein.

Thanks Peni... Again! :D