The Counter
You have taken on a small shop: four areas to keep stocked, one person’s week of hours, and a lease. Walk the floor, the stockroom, the delivery bay and the back office — the walk between jobs is what the week actually costs. Order stock that arrives later than you paid for it, put it out, book help or don’t, meet what falls due, and open the week at the till. Twelve weeks. Same shop in 3D or in text, same numbers, same seed.
Money earned and money available are two different numbers. Most shops that close were not idle and were not badly run. They ran out of money in the account on a day money was wanted, while holding stock and being owed takings — a timing problem, against obligations written on a calendar that does not read your month. This game will never tell you that working harder was the answer, and it will never grade the person who closes.
You are standing on the shop floor. Walk to a fixture and use the button that appears.
You have taken on a small counter with four areas to keep stocked, one week's worth of your own hours, and a lease. Walk the floor with the arrow keys, WASD or the on-screen pad; turn in quarter turns; stand at a fixture and use the button that appears. Walking between jobs spends the shop's modeled hours — the stockroom is at the back for the same reason it is at the back in a real shop. Reading costs nothing and never will. When you have done what you can, open the week at the till and see what the week did.
- Week
- 1 of 12
- In the account
- $6,500
- Season earned
- $0
- Held for the state
- $0
- Hours left off the counter
- 12.0
- Weeks of cover
- 5.9 (deep)
Walk up to a fixture — the till, a shelf, the order desk, the tray, the hours book or the roller door — and its controls appear here.
What week 1 brought
- A quiet period. Nothing landed. Quiet periods are real and are not a bug.
The shop is carrying several weeks of cover, and the same event costs more where there is less to absorb it with. That is the model doing on purpose what the world does anyway.
Figures that move, and who publishes the current one
- The sales tax you collect, and how often you must remit it
Rates and filing frequency are set by the state, and often the county and city on top, and change on their own schedules. A number printed here would be wrong somewhere on the day it was printed and wrong everywhere within a few years.
SBA — pay taxes (routes to your state's revenue department) - The minimum wage that actually applies to you
Many states and some cities set their own, several index them to inflation every January, and the highest applicable one governs.
U.S. Department of Labor — state minimum wage laws - The Social Security wage base the 6.2 percent stops at
It is indexed and republished every year. The 1.45 percent Medicare share has no ceiling at all.
IRS Publication 15, Employer's Tax Guide - What a unit like this rents for
No agency publishes the rent on your street. It is whatever the lease says, and the lease is a negotiation between two people about one address.
Your own signed lease — and before signing, a commercial agent and a lawyer - What card payments cost you and when they land
The discount rate and the settlement schedule are terms in the agreement with your processor, not public figures, and they differ between two shops on the same street.
Your merchant processing agreement — the schedule is a term in it - What share of firms are still trading after five years
The Bureau of Labor Statistics republishes establishment survival with every release of Business Employment Dynamics, so the current figure is the one on their page rather than one memorised from a game.
BLS — Business Employment Dynamics, entrepreneurship and business survival
The shop, the street, the suppliers and every price in it are invented. The pacing numbers — hours in a week, margin on a shelf, how fast a delivery arrives — are MODELED — NOT SOURCED and are listed as such in the arcade registry. What is real is named at each fixture with the authority it came from, and where a real figure moves with the year or the state, this game names the office that publishes the current one instead of quoting a number that will be wrong by next spring.
Buffer weighting in this model: 160 percent of an event’s force lands on a shop with less than a week of cover for every 60 percent that lands on one with three. MODELED — NOT SOURCED, like every pacing number here.
Nothing here is scored, saved or sent anywhere beyond this browser’s own arcade record. The shop, the street, the suppliers and every price in it are invented and labelled as a model. What is real — the employer’s share of payroll tax, the federal minimum floor, what trust fund money is, what a date label does and does not mean — is named at the fixture with the authority it came from. Where a figure moves with the year or the state, this game names the office that publishes the current one instead of quoting a number that would be wrong by next spring. No real person or business is named.