I always forget how much fun I have running a business until I do it again. I've done restaurants (which I find exceedingly difficult), furniture stores, fresh markets (particularly fun), and right now I'm starting my -- surprisingly -- first flower shop, run by Coral & Herb.

I think my favorite thing about it is that you can get quite creative, and you can offer items that are normally specific to certain sims -- i.e., my well-seasoned farmer selling mouthwatering produce. What sorts of businesses do you like to run? Do you prefer home or community lots?

I once had a corner shop run by the servo couple of my selfmade family. They sell everything from harvest goods, homemade quilts, pottery and the like. The store was overrun by customers and the servos can't produce new items as fast as they were sold. I had to built more servos and put up a manufactury. But it was fun, though the servos weren't no longer the servants they were intented. The shop was on a community lot and better so: they wouldn't have the time to produce and sell at the same time.

P.S.: I moved the servos out into their own house because the family dad roll the want to quit his job. I like to think because of the loads of money the corner shop makes without him even lift a finger. Lazy guy. :D

I've run a bakery before, and It's pretty fun but kinda simple. I had a salon in Bluewater Village run by Cassandra Goth, and that was pretty fun. I like to turn simple looking townies into sims I can look at for more than two seconds.

I have a venue called The Tacky Flamingo that has bowling, hot tubs, and a very buff, 10-Outgoing-points owner. Swimsuit Bowling Night is always very popular for some reason...

It's a fun and easy venue to run, because the tickets basically sell themselves. The owner needs to clean up the snack plates and coffee cups, clean the toilet occasionally, and spend time in the hot tub and the business makes money hand over fist. All my other businesses tend to hemorrhage money instead.

I have a lot of businesses but I think my favorites are those selling weird things. I like seeing what sims buy and going through their inventories when I open up their house. One of my business is a type of joke shop run by a witch, that is she enjoys selling such things as stink bombs and having sims lose money and clothes at her strip poker table. The funniest time was when the ministers wife lost all her clothes and left mortified.

I remember when Open For Business just came out, I made a place that I liked to call, in EXACT PUNCTUATION TOO. "Place,for,stuff.come." I remember selling the most random crap in the catalog.. and selling them for EXTREMELY RIDICULOUS PRICES. I remember selling vases, and tables (JUST THAT!) for the you know EXTREME PRICES settings.
I was a wierd person then.

~TheSimsMeow - Live, Love, Laugh, Meow~

If I want my sim to make tons of money and especially if they are romance sims, I will have them run a brothel or the like. If my sims are creative I will have them sell flowers, especially snapdragons, because my sims always need the motive boost from them. Both types of businesses are fun and even helpful, for their own reasons.

Eventually I plan to set up a sort of novelty brothel - for all those sims who crave women with facial hair, or full-face makeup, or werewolves. Or stink.

I like making business and just making npc like sims so I can customize the uniforms. I don't really run the businesses.

My favorite business is usually a plant/flower shop-with live plants and trees. It's fun unloading them from inventory, and decorating the house lots-especially when it's a limited selection as in the desert, with cacti and hardy shrubs. I don't have any crafting shops because they're a pain to restock all the time.

My favorite business? I have a witch with a home business. He's selling books, reagents and other items. It's a very good business. My favorite business is actually an ice skating rink with a small arcade. Really, all my sim has to do is buy pizza for lunch (to share with the customers), skate and chat. It's scary how much money he's making.

I haven't played with OFB that long but I had/have 4 businesses total which I have had fun playing (pictures included!)

The first was a flower shop ('Boutique of Blooms") run out of Haley Paulson's townhouse. She would have her shop open every other day and on the off days would create more bouquets to replenish stock - she only hired a Nelle Van Dien as a cashier but otherwise maintained the business on her own. She did that until she got a golden talent badge and moved to downtown to an apartment and found new interests. I enjoyed playing the flower boutique a lot, it's a good way for a single sim to get some good play time in.

The second business I had a sim run was an elder sim, Emmeline Van Dien, who has a maintained her job as a noted Restauranteur in the culinary track. and she opened a bakery/dessert shop ('Sweet Treats' ) where she would sell cakes, pies, cheesecakes, cookies, baked alaskas, crepes, and gelatin. Her daughter knew something about flowers and so they sold some flowers along with the sweet treats and marketed it as this vintage delights shop with art nouveu stylings. Her daughter was actually the cashier of the flower boutique owner from the story above so she knew her way around a store and it really helped her mother out. I tried selling coffee but no one wanted it while I was playing as the owning sims. After the daughter went off to college, her mother relied on the help of two employees with high cooking skills to maintain bakery stock while she smoozed with customers and checked them out. Pretty interesting to play though I wished the coffee would have sold and for some reason I lose a lot more money and always end up in the red

A sim from a family with old money, Pryce Cosgrove, bought out the old neo-classical opera house and re-modeled it into a fancy ballroom for society galas (Le' Theatre , downloaded from MTS) elite functions, charity balls or for a sim to use as s reason to dress up and go out classic dancing. It cost 58 Simeloens to get a ticket but a sim is treated to a full bar and a fancy dinner buffet. He hired a bartender and a local teen to keep the place clean during functions. Formal wear is required ont he premises. So far a masquerade charity ball has been held there by Pryce himself, as well as it has been the location of at least one marriage proposal. I have only been on site with the owner twice and it was okay, I would like to play this venture more and get a working jazz band to perform.

The most recent business is the 'Kashmire Dance Studio' opened by Sophia Louis. She maintains a job as a ballroom dancer in the dance career but since she is really into music and dance as her one true hobby, so the studio is a great thing for her to pursue interest in as well as make money form. She has her husband DJ for dance contests and there is a room to learn breakdancing as well as a mirrored room with bars to practice ballet. This business also relies on the bandatron to gather simoleons, but is only about 30 simolens to enter and dance to one's heart content. Sophia is also a very high dance/music hobbyist so she will be able to instruct sims, including her three daughters (fourth is on the way!) It is a very amusing set-up, I love having dance contests.

FUTURE BUSINESSES I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE SIMS OWN & PLAY:

-Photography studio
-Charming Local Restaurant
-Mom and Pop Produce/grocery store
-Nightclub
-Spa and Salon with working masseuses
-Cozy Book Store

I was in the process of building a major corporation when I lost my last hood to corruption. I had an actual factory with many crafting stations, and a Nookington's or Nookway store in every subhood except the military bases (which have Navy Exchange and AAFES) and Bluewater Village (where the small business owners protested it enough that they didn't build a Nookington's in the area). These stores are of course based on Tom Nook's Shop in Nintendo's Animal Crossing, and I also kind-of sort-of made it into a parody of Wal-Mart, with super centers selling virtually everything owned by the largest corporation in the fictional world.

I like businesses that make lots of money really easy. One popular choice is running a car dealership. I sell expensive cars for a ridiculously high profit and the owner-sim gets rich in no time. I also have a real-estate office, which can make nice money, but it's really hard to sell the very expensive lots.

In addition to the idea of making quick money easily - one of my sims is an artist and has a painting/sculpture studio in her house. She also runs a home business of selling her creations, straight from the art studio. She charges the 'works' ridiculously high (I think the current rate is about §9999 per painting ) and the other art-loving sims just keep on buying. Ka-ching!

My first successful types of businesses and favorite to run are flower shops or salons. I love giving the townies makeovers.

See, I tried to have my town artist have an art studio from his home, but nobody would pay the prices! And I'm talking $200-$400 a painting, nothing crazy! I finally had to shut the business down because he literally didn't sell a single one and it was just cutting into his painting time.

As for my favorite business, definitely my town's version of a brothel/sex club. It's the easiest business in the world. You don't even NEED to have employees (although I do have one, and then the owner brings girls who live with him and work there) and it's nothing but pure profit. Plus, it makes my romance-oriented Sims super happy, and my romance-oriented pimp/brothel-owner Percy the richest (and happiest) man in the whole neighborhood, lol. I made a dressing room (though that is purely ornamental), a public restroom, a bar, a bedroom with tacky neon lights and a heart-shaped bed (no one has ever actually used that either, but... come on, what kind of brothel doesn't have a bed?), then there's a "champagne room" with couches and a television where you can just hang out and watch TV, or you could get a lap dance if my Sims could do that... carefully framed snapshots can make it LOOK like they're giving lap dances, lol) and then the main "dungeon room" which has a custom adult shower so Sims can hook up even if they barely/don't know each other, a custom Woohoo... chaise/couch type thing where they can also woohoo without prejudice, and for the kinkier Sim, a shackle/chain that's bolted to the dungeon wall for even more possibility of anonymous woohooing. Honestly, most of my Sims who go there just end up watching TV, lol, but they're still paying to be there, so... Percy doesn't care, he's still raking in the money.

Is there a way to set a dress code for a community lot like that? I would love to have a formal-only venue for galas and events like that! I've never tried, because I didn't know how to make it formal...

I think my sims enjoy gift shops,beauty salons and pet shops.I like them too,because it's not 'complicated',and sims earn too much money,lol xd

TwoJeffs Visitor Controller on Simbology lets you set the dress code for a community lot. There are several versions of it, depending on your EPs.

It just depends on my mood, sometimes I want a no hassle shop that sells catalog items, and sometimes I prefer to have to make the stuff to sell. I really hate restaurants. I think they are the hardest. I will still get a wild hair and start one every now and then (usually with a large family to run it) but it never lasts very long...

What I did, I downloaded the simblender which has a handy setting where you can immediately dress everyone in a certain type of clothes. It looks like a potted plant so I just put it in one of the side entryways as decor but when Pryce is on the lot and a bunch of people start coming in to dance I just use him, click the simblender and do the Appearance menu where ther eis an option for dress all in formal. I hope that helps!


Also you brothel comment reminds me of another business venture I was planning on starting. I have 'The House of the Setting Sun' in my downtown which is a desert and meant to be like a mini Las Vegas with cantinas, hustling pool halls, and poker joints, and a shady hook-up motel.
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Anyway, quite awhile ago, long before I got OFB, I specifically made 5 'Ladies of the night' named Tokyo Tease, Tijuana Tease, Black Velvet, Lolly Drop, and Ginger Snaps who live there and are very good at filling a romance sims needs. I was thinking about having them start a home business set ACR to Brothel-mode and letting them rake in the cash. (And if sims don't want to woo-hoo they can always have a fair time on the pole, I can't seem to keep sims away from that thing)

It depends on it we define run as play the owners, or run as in have other Sims go to. I love having my Sims buy their items from a store, rather than it magically appearing from thin air and money vanishing in return. I don't play all of these stores from the owners perspective, since it's more about being there for when a playable needs something than it is running a business to own money.

I haven't run that many different kinds of businesses, but a favorite was my first (and so far only) home business, where a farm-loving Sim of mine set up a tiny farmers market in her backyard to sell her produce. It was small enough that she could do everything herself, and it went rather well.

I am very excited about a few that I've built, but haven't gotten around to using yet. Really looking forward to my lunch restaurant, that sells to-go lunch or family dinners (just regular plates of food), and the arcade with every game you can think of. There's also an art gallery that I am very fond of, that I imagine will be fun to run. If the lunch restaurant is fun, I'll probably make a university-version that sells crappy food cheap to university students.

I love running places that offer clothes and makeovers. That way I can change all the townies to my liking, heh heh.

One of my favorite shops was a toilet shop. Brandon Lillard married one of my alphabetacy founder's children and didn't feel like going into a normal career path so I had him sell toilets. It was a smashing success. I'd marry in a townie generations later and they'd have 10+ crappers in their inventory, lol.

Brandon then took it upon himself to make over all his fellow townie brethren. Here are just a few (that I have pix of): Sandy, Christie, Goopy, and Kennedy.

I could never get restaurants to work correctly. I tried one once and the cooks made the meals and the servers brought it out to the customer at which point the plate disappeared. So the customers became furious because they couldn't eat, argh. I never did find a solution to that and I really liked the place I built for it too.

I was pretty fond of Malcolm Landgraab's car dealership when I had him run one in a previous Uberhood.

It was always fun to see what cars my playables had bought/wasted money on. Dina Caliente Goth bought the ugly yellow EA sportscar. No taste. Three or four of them in her inventory. Sorry, Dina, you can only have one ugly car: Mortimer gets the other driveway slot, ooh, Mal talked him into that fire-engine red convertible.

I love bakeries, but they are pretty exhausting to run, since food quickly runs out and you've got to order it all the time and that you have to mark all the cakes and food all over again when you bake something new.
Otherwise having a fish-store is fun. Fish is free and you can get quite a lot of it, and it pays pretty good!

I have never had a store that sells flowers or mechanics.
Neither a hair saloon, I don't get it. How do you mark what a haircut or makeover costs?