Capitalism 2 and Capitalism Lab Forum

I play this game on and off again occasionally, and I am by no means an expert. A recent trip to an 80K + trade show got me back into the mood to explore the possibilities in Cap Lab.

So here is the situation. I am a year or two into the game. The retail markets are beginning to reach saturation from seaport products. A clear retail giant has emerged (and its not me). I've been watching their research and their retail offerings to see if I can ride their coattails with semi product manufacturing.

In the meantime, I'm the leader in footware. Surprisingly, it was a decently long time before I faced competition in my sector. I (probably foolishly as it would have probably been a better idea to pursue more sales) have a wholesaler set up to private label. I've built a small amount of branding to get a headstart on any upstarts, and am ready to pull the advertising trigger on anyone who tries to compete with me while using the same seaport suppliers. Since my supply lines are still strong, semi's aren't ready to get manufactured, and cash in hand isn't cash that's making you money, I decide to increase my retail presence in the largest market cities to capture more sales while my training programs catch up.

First additional store I build is in a 82 wage city. I have a store with a sales unit at full utilization. The market share for sandals is about 60% me, 15% competitor operating out of a discount store with traffic of about 30 and the rest local competitors sitting at around (8) overall value. My newest store is a footware which should get a bonus due to being both specialty and accompanied by another footware store, sitting on 72 traffic (land was not cheap) with a quality of about 28. Competitor and my other store are sitting at quality 26 with my newest store also beating both them and the local competitors on price. Despite all of this, my new store has very few sales (you'd think it'd either capture sales from all three of the sources currently selling), and after a decent amount of time to let things even out, is still not selling through. There are no supply issues and the 26 quality product is selling at my other store just fine. The level 1 sales unit in the newest store is sitting at around 30% utilization.

Is there a large threshold in overall value that needs to be surpassed before customers jump stores? If that's the case, why am I not eating into more local competitor market share? Without having ridiculous pricing discrepancies between my two stores, which are selling the same product (with the better performer in a worse area), how do I get these additional stores to capture sales when theoretically are winning on all fronts?

The best way is to capture market is to have quality product with low price, and by this you will destroy competition both local and computer. Judging by your post there are few factors:
- Quality - I think that sandal's quality of 28 is pretty low and this drags your price to be even lower
- What's the size of the city ? The market for each product is not the same, maybe market for sandals is just small. You can check this when you go to the Products tab, first graph next to the picture has the full the market value for that specific product
- Also you can see here what are the factors that are impacting score for that product - if the quality is important, or the price is more important, and where is the brand in all of that ?
For an example, livestock products are like 45% quality, 40% price and 5% brand, which means you don't need to heavily advertise them, but the quality must be really good.
One more thing to look at is that every single store is fighting for it's piece of pie, and the stores that are working for several months are always going to beat newly open stores.
For you game here, my suggestion would be to go with discount mega stores, since they are attracting customers with lower prices and also, the lower quality of product will not hurt the store's reputation. If you are using special stores, then make sure you have good quality product.

Thanks Nosedigger, though I don't know if those are the issues that I'm encountering. Hopefully my screenshots come through in the attachments.

To make it clear on my goals. I'm trying to capture the white, local competitor segment. Its been pretty stagnantly at the market share that you can see in the image, so I don't think that my competitor has the sales capacity to capture it at the moment. I'm not trying to price war with the competitor because there are still lower hanging fruits.
- For quality, sure a 28 overall is terrible, but my 28, rubber with a string sandals, are a lot better than the (8), paper trying to masquerade as sandals, of my competitors. I get that quality, price and brand all factor at different strengths for a product, but in this case, shouldn't the higher overall quality beat the local competitors? Weirdly, my 26 overall quality store, is generating most of market share.
- I also know that there a segment of the market that are cheapos and prefer lower price even when inferior. I'm beating the local competitors by a large margin on price, so I don't think they're holding onto the cheapo segment.
-This store has been open for a couple of months, you can see in firm window that the other products have ramped up to full utilization.

I don't understand why the discount mega store would be the better option in this place? I don't need their higher sales volume as I can't utilize my current capacity. To my knowledge, they don't get a bonus and I'm already price leader and beating the local competition on overall quality; wouldn't it be better to get the specialty + chain bonus of two footware stores? Finally, I thought that reputation brand loyalty was only hurt if overall quality was less than average quality in town (which I'm also beating)?
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Ok, so the price and the quality (42) are really nice, but your brand is zero. I see that general score is better than city average, and you have nice piece of market, however look at the score composition - brand is almost a third of the grade and you have none. And you will agree 28 score out of 100 is not that appealing. Try next, load the save game, max out the marketing so your brand hits 30, and just observe the sales. If the sales start going up in 3+ months (which I'm 99% sure it will), then reload and prepare marketing strategy.