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The math of supermarkets


Mister Death
RJ: McFlono McFloninoo

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So I wanted to see exactly how much factory space I needed to keep my supermarket stocked with all 114 items. I had to make some simplifying assumptions.

Assumption 1: Since I don't have space for four more factories, I'll be paying cash for lumber, containers and metal. I've presumed that in the long run the price will be 2x wholesale.
Assumption 2: All water is straight from the well. I'm actually going to run the numbers again, because (a) I'm using bought-filtered water for everything now and (b) in the long run I'll be filtering my own.
Assumption 3 (Scott?): Sales of an item are, give or take, inversely proportional to wholesale value. In other words, I can sell roughly the same wholesale-dollar amount of every single good. If this is wildly off, I would dearly love to know.
Assumption 4: I typed all the numbers and formulae in correctly! Yeah, right.

Anyway...for a supermarket, the magic number is $65.72. This is how much it costs me to stock a wholesale dollar's worth of every product in the store. Or, averaged over all 114 products, it costs me 57.65 cents on the wholesale dollar. Right now I'm wholesaling at 2x wholesale and retailing at 4x, so I'm looking at about a 600% profit margin.

But that's only the tip of the iceberg. If I wanted to produce and sell a wholesale dollar's worth of each item per second, in addition to about $65.72 per second, or $5.7 million per day, I would need:

226 m^2 power plant
626 m^2 well
695 m^2 livestock farm
776 m^2 dairy processing
1000 m^2 bakery (exactly!)
1015 m^2 confectionery
1280 m^2 ice cream factory
2114 m^2 fruit plantation
2701 m^2 food processing
2795 m^2 beverage plant, and...
2978 m^2 plantation!

(I would also need a much larger supermarket!)

The product I have to make the most of is sugar, which is used in so many other products that its relative factor is 7.94; for every 100 bags of sugar I sell in the store, I need 694 more bags to go into a whole swath of different products. In fact, fully 29% of my food processing time goes to making sugar! The next highest relative factor is unsurprisingly sugar's main ingredient, sugar cane (5.02), and third is flour (3.74).

But the 114 products I sell aren't everything - there are another 23 ingredients I need to make (soon to be 24 as I bring cans online), plus 6 different containers and lumber (soon to add aluminum, if anybody wants to sell some, hint hint! (-:) that I import. The most important of these by far is milk; I use 9.61 units of milk in various dairy products and beverages.

Any questions? I mean, besides the obvious, "Are you crazy, or what?"
Scott (Admin)
RJ: Ratan Joyce
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Answer to 3:
I believe what you assumed is close enough, although it's a little more complicated than that - there is also a variable called "selltime" that I can adjust manually. This is so I can adjust each item individually to make them easier/harder to sell in the future (consider partly finished goods such as car bodies and airplane wings, and those industrial products).

Also about the sugar comment - please don't hate me, but I think you'll need to include salt (mines) and pepper (plantation) soon...
Mister Death
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I don't hate you! Pepper should be a luxury product like vanilla if you ask me. (Vanilla, by the way, is by my calculations the product I produce the *least* of square-footage-wise.) And I had in fact been asking myself just yesterday why salt wasn't an ingredient/condiment/product. I figured the the Benevolent Dictator was just fighting hypertension in his own devious way...but yeah, I'm definitely going to have to add a mine once that one comes along.
Walter Yorkshire
RJ: Walter Yorkshire
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Or you could just buy it on the B2B market from your local friendly mining company :) I expect to have Q50 salt a few days after it is introduced.
Mister Death
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Get producing Q50 sugar and we'll talk (-: Seriously though, my next factories were always going to be a smelter and a mine...for the glass bottles that nobody seems to want to produce!


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