Selling and Wedding.

The first thing Yulia did when she got home after her date with Derek was to call Christian Love and invite him over so that she could hire him to make Snapdragon Bouquets for her venues. While she was on the phone, her home venue reached Level 6.

Yulia thought long and hard about which Business Perk to take next. (She’d already taken all the Cash perks.) Though she was interested in one of the Perception perks, and most of the Motivation perks, the ones she wanted in those categories were far up in the list, meaning that she would not soon reap the benefits of them. Since she had hopes for a serious relationship with Derek, and since Derek had a salaried job, and since he was new to the neighborhood and didn’t know anyone, Yulia figured that the first couple of Connections perks would help her give Derek a boost at his job by making friends for him (and that those perks would also help Yulia increase the popularity of her venue). So, she chose the first Connections perk:

Once Christian arrived, Yulia chatted with him a bit more,

then hired him.

She bought a Flower Arranging station and installed it in a small, well-lit building,

and Christian went to work making Snapdragon Bouquets.

And Yulia finally went to sleep.

Once she woke up, she maxed out Charisma,

and set to work on the next phase of her project. She bought a cash register, a shelf to put it on, and then hauled out onto her front lawn all the crappy items her Wants had made her buy,

and set each of them for sale at a very high price—$999.

While waiting for customers to peruse the items, she took time to appreciate the lovely flowers Derek had sent her after their date.

She also cashed in some of her Aspiration Rewards points, got an Energizer, and used it.

Yulia was ready to start selling.

She offered an item for sale to Tiffany Zarubin, who had just bought a ticket to the venue. Once Tiffany had a “Buy Bar” above her head,

Yulia moved in and did “Sales—Basic Sell.” On her 4th (unsuccessful) try, Yulia earned a Bronze Sales Badge, but Tiffany lost her Buy Bar.

But at least Tiffany gained a customer loyalty star.

Yulia tried Basic Sell again and again, but didn't succeed in selling any of her expensively priced merchandise.

But Derek showed up at the lot, so the evening took a turn for the better.

Yulia proposed,

and Derek accepted.

While Yulia—who wanted a formal wedding—changed into a beautiful white dress and went to stand under the wedding arch, and Derek dawdled amid the many crappy items for sale ('What is going on here?' he wondered), one of Yulia’s occasional customers, a man named Kennedy Cox, came by to offer his support, and to tell her she was doing the right thing.

Yulia didn’t really understand why this casual acquaintance had done this, but she was touched by his good wishes nonetheless.

Derek eventually changed into a suite and came over to the arch,

and, just as night fell, he and Yulia were wed.

And Yulia forgot about selling, and skilling, and customers, and money, for the rest of the night.

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NOTES FROM THE AUTHOR:

When Yulia was on the phone with Christian Love (trying to get her relationship with him high enough so that she could invite him over and hire him), he said, “You are simply the coolest Sim I’ve met in ages. I’m going to spread the word to everyone I know. Yulia Cox, your reputation is on the way up!” Does anyone here know what that means, and what effect it has on your Sim?

Derek came into the household with 38,650 aspiration points—I guess he really enjoyed dating/marrying Yulia!

Strategy:

1. As an employee starts producing Snapdragon Bouquets, put the first few he makes around him, to increase his motives (except for Energy, obviously). You can do this even if your Sim is sleeping at the time, as Yulia was. But you have to watch a bouquet for several Sim minutes right after you place one—the first one Christian produced sent off pink fumes (good); the second sent off green fumes (bad), so I had to delete it stat to keep from depressing Christian’s motives.

If you end up with a lot of snapdragons to check at once, you can stick them all in a big grid somewhere on the lot, and wait till your Sims are asleep or all your Sims are doing lengthy tasks and THEN watch (because you'd be on triple speed anyway).

2. Setting a custom price is, I think, one of the hardest things to do in OFB, but it’s absolutely necessary for real success. And it's somewhat counterintuitive to accomplish, and there doesn’t seem to be an explanation anywhere online that I can find. If you buy a cash register and just click on it, you get “Set Price for Everything”, and it takes FOREVER (wasting almost 1/2 of a Sim hour for Yulia to price her 5 initial items), and the maximum price it allows is “Ridiculously Expensive” (which, if you’re selling all the danged flamingos you acquired to satisfy cheap “Buy a Sculpture” wants, isn’t much). If you use the Business interface in the upper right-hand corner and click on “Business Build Tools,” it’s quick, but you still get a max price of only Ridiculously Expensive. If you buy display shelves, put your items on them, and click on the shelves, you still get a max price of only Ridiculously Expensive.

Here’s how to do it: set your items out (whether on display shelves or not; it doesn't matter to the pricing). Go to the business interface in the upper right-hand corner, click on “Business Build Tools” (it’s much faster than using the cash register), pick ANY price level (it doesn't matter which; you're going to change it in a minute), and click on each item (or on each set of display shelves, if you’re using them, which means you can set the price of all items on a set of shelves at the same time--whether those items are all of the same type or of different types). Then click Business Build Tools again, to exit out of it, and click one of each different type of ITEM (e.g., one flamingo, if you have multiples of them)—not the SHELVES if you’re using them—and you will get the option to “Set Price of Type.” Click that, and something like the following screen will come up:

Click on that price tag with the asterisk that’s to the right of “Current Price: $630” (or whatever price shows up for you). That will bring up something like the following screen:

Move your cursor to the “630” field, change it to whatever custom price you want (I always pick “999” until my Sim has a Gold Sales badge, and at that point change it to “9,999”), and click the checkmark. Do this for one of every type of distinct item (i.e., one flamingo out of the several you may have, or one Contempto Good Livin' armchair, out of the several you may have).

Your items should now, when you hover over them, all say: “Custom Setting: $999.”

Was Yulia frustrated that she couldn't sell any of her crappy merchandise to her customers today? Not at all! The point of setting a price like $999 for low-quality stuff is not to convince customers to buy it, but rather to convince the customers NOT to buy it, and instead to get your Sim a Gold sales badge as fast as possible. Customers won't buy crappy stuff at a price like this UNLESS YOUR SIM HAS A GOLD SALES BADGE AND CAN DO THE "SALES--DAZZLE" INTERACTION. If your Sim were to try to sell crappy stuff at a low price, she'd unfortunately succeed quite often--and so would waste time ringing up sales, restocking, and moving on to new customers. (Even if your Sim has employees doing register and restocking, she's paying them and therefore hemorrhaging money and having to worry about their Needs.) With a really high price, your Sim can run the venue herself, and concentrate on the same customer several times in a row, allowing you to queue up 8 Basic Sells at a time and play on triple forward speed.

Custom pricing is, hands down, THE FASTEST WAY TO MAKE MONEY IN SIMS 2, WITHOUT EXCEPTION!!! With an Energizer, a Sim can easily make way more than $100,000 a day.

(Oh, and a Sim with Charisma of 10 will get the Gold sales badge much faster than one with less Charisma.)

3. Re selling the easel, rather than keeping it, my Sims are so good at making money that I don’t want them spending hours and hours painting “Masterpieces” to sell. If they want to learn Creativity, I provide them with a piano because, at least when they get decent at it, others enjoy listening to them and may add customer loyalty stars because of it. That never happens if customers are watching others paint!