Expect every new store to lose money for its first few years. Leave it at 1★ while its demand climbs, then upgrade all six categories evenly once demand reaches about 50%, to at least 60★. The store pays you back while demand sits between about 60% and 85%. When the game warns that the country’s stores are overloaded, sell them all in one go.
Why New Stores Lose Money
A store’s income depends on its country’s demand, the 🔥 percentage in your store list. Demand starts at 0 when you open your first store in a country and climbs a little every day. It’s slow: in a typical country, a single 1★ store takes about four and a half years of game time to reach 80%, and a 60★ store takes nearly three. Higher stars make it climb faster, and every upgrade click and every purchase of stores there gives it a small push.
Demand never drops on its own. The only thing that lowers it is selling stores, which is covered under When Stores Get Overloaded.
At low demand there aren’t enough customers to cover a store’s running costs, so a new store loses money every day. The game adds up each day’s result and pays it into your budget on the 28th of every month, shown as SHOPS EARNING with the month’s total, in red when it’s a loss. A red total every month for your first few years of stores is normal.
Stores don’t raise your device sales; the sales guide covers what does. They do earn company skill points, though. Each time the number of countries where you own at least one store reaches a new high, your Economy and Infrastructure skill branch gains 1.5 points for each extra country. Only new records count: selling never takes points back, and reopening in a country only pays if it takes you past your previous best. The branch gains a level every 40 points, so stores in about 27 new countries add one level.
One store is enough to count a country, so spreading single stores across many countries earns these points without a big investment in each. If you’d rather not keep a lone store, it sells back for 35% of its price plus $15,000 per ★.
How Stars and Demand Decide Profit
Each ★ adds running cost from the moment you buy it, while the extra customers it brings only pay off once demand is high. At low demand, a higher-star store loses more money than a 1★ store.
The table shows one store’s result per day, in dollars, in a country of about 40 million people. Read down a column to follow one store as its demand climbs over the years. A month is roughly 30 times these figures, and every store you own in the same country earns or loses the same amount, so ten stores there make ten times as much.
| Demand | 1★ | 5★ | 20★ | 30★ | 60★ | 100★ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20% | −2,300 | −3,900 | −9,700 | −13,100 | −20,200 | −22,400 |
| 40% | −2,100 | −3,100 | −6,600 | −7,700 | −3,900 | +18,400 |
| 60% | −1,700 | −1,700 | −1,700 | +600 | +19,500 | +74,900 |
| 70% | −1,400 | −700 | +1,500 | +5,800 | +33,900 | +108,900 |
| 80% | −1,000 | +400 | +5,200 | +11,700 | +50,000 | +146,900 |
| 85% | −5,300 | −7,500 | −14,100 | −14,600 | +4,500 | +79,900 |
| 90% | −11,700 | −19,600 | −44,200 | −56,300 | −72,300 | −44,200 |
| 100% | −33,700 | −62,800 | −155,100 | −213,800 | −385,100 | −604,400 |
A 1★ store never makes money in a country this size. It just loses the least while demand is low, which is why you leave new stores alone at first. High stars start paying between 40% and 60% demand: at 60% demand a 60★ store earns about $19,500 a day while a 5★ store still loses $1,700.
The 80% Sweet Spot
Every store earns the most at exactly 80% demand, whatever its stars. Above 80%, its running costs climb steeply. Above 85%, its sales start falling too, down to 15% of normal at 100% demand.
The drop is fast. A 60★ store that makes $50,000 a day at 80% demand is down to $4,500 at 85% and loses about $7,300 a day at 86%. That’s also when the game starts warning that your stores in that country are overloaded. You can’t hold a country at 80%, because demand keeps rising whatever you do. A 60★ store spends a little over a year between 80% and 85%, then a little over two more years to reach 90%, losing more every month on the way.
Upgrading Stores
Each country’s stores have six upgrade categories: Staff, Logistics and Supply, Infrastructure, Technologies, Management and Processes and Safety and Reliability. An upgrade applies to every store you own in that country, and so does the price: each click is charged once per store.
The store’s ★ is the average of all six categories. That’s all the categories do, so a star from Staff is worth exactly the same as a star from Technologies. Choose by price instead. A click costs 6% of the country’s store price per store at first, rising to about 13% at 60★ as that category’s own level grows. The lowest category is always the cheapest, so keep clicking whichever one is lowest. That also keeps all six even. PAY ALL upgrades every category at once.
Each click adds a random amount, about one star to that category on average, which moves the store’s ★ up by about a fifth of a star. Getting from 1★ to 60★ takes about 310 clicks and costs roughly 30 times the store’s price for each store you own there, or about 60 times for 100★. In Bangladesh, where a store costs $357,000, 60★ comes to about $11 million per store. A perk cuts the cost of upgrading stores by 10%.
When to Upgrade
Start upgrading once demand reaches about 50%, and go to at least 60★ in one session, keeping all six categories even.
This simulation follows a single store in Bangladesh (41 million people, store price $357,000) for eight years. Each column is a different plan. The figures are your total cash from that store at the end of each year, in millions of dollars, counting what you paid for the store and its upgrades.
| Year | Never upgrade | 30★ at once | 60★ at once | 60★ at 50% demand | 60★ at 65% demand | 100★ at 50% demand |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | −1.2 | −10.8 | −17.5 | −1.2 | −1.2 | −1.2 |
| 2 | −2.1 | −13.2 | −14.4 | −2.1 | −2.1 | −2.1 |
| 3 | −3.0 | −14.1 | −7.7 | −13.0 | −3.0 | −7.2 |
| 4 | −3.8 | −13.9 | +1.6 | −6.5 | −3.8 | +24.1 |
| 5 | −4.5 | −13.0 | +12.8 | +2.6 | −13.6 | +60.7 |
| 6 | −5.2 | −11.5 | +23.1 | +13.7 | −4.3 | +99.8 |
| 7 | −5.9 | −11.1 | +26.3 | +24.3 | +7.0 | +129.5 |
| 8 | −6.6 | −14.4 | +22.9 | +28.1 | +17.2 | +148.4 |
- Never upgrading loses under $1 million a year, forever.
- 30★ never pays back. It carries the running cost of 30 stars without ever earning enough to cover it, and by year 8 demand has passed 80% and the losses are growing again. Stopping halfway is the worst plan in the table.
- 60★ at once works eventually, but you need $17.5 million in the first year and only break even in year 4.
- 60★ at 50% demand costs only $2.1 million over the first two years, then catches up and finishes ahead by year 8.
- 60★ at 65% demand waits too long. By year 8 it’s $11 million behind the plan that upgraded at 50%.
- 100★ at 50% demand finishes about five times ahead of 60★. Every extra star earns more once demand is past 50%, so if you can afford to go beyond 60★, do it.
The best plans slow down or turn downward in year 8 as demand reaches the mid-80s. That’s your cue to sell.
Every Stores Visit Counts as an Extra Day
The game works out every store’s result once a day. It also works out a full extra day, for every store you own in every country, each time you open the Stores screen, each time you click an upgrade and each time you sell. That extra day goes into the month’s total like any other.
While your stores are losing money, every visit and every click costs you another day of losses. A 310-click upgrade run adds 310 extra days of results for all of your stores, so check how your other countries are doing before a big run. Once your stores are making money, the same rule works for you: each visit and click earns an extra day of profit. It’s also one reason a big upgrade run pays off quickly once demand is high enough.
Which Countries to Pick
A store’s running costs grow with its country’s population, but only between about 3 million and 200 million people. Inside that range, bigger countries bring more customers but also need more stars to break even. At 60% demand, a store breaks even at about 18★ in a country of 3 million people, 29★ in a country of 40 million and 76★ just above 200 million.
Skip countries under about 3 million people. Their costs stop shrinking while their customer count keeps falling, so even a well-upgraded store earns very little. In a country of 1 million people, a 60★ store makes only about $1,600 a day at 80% demand and needs about 86★ just to break even at 60%. Nine countries need more than 60★ even at 80% demand: Andorra, Greenland, Liberia, Luxembourg, Maldives, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro and San Marino.
The three countries above 200 million people get the opposite effect: costs stop growing while customers keep coming.
| Country | Break-even at 60% demand | Break-even at 80% demand |
|---|---|---|
| China | 5★ | 1★ |
| India | 20★ | 3★ |
| USA | 42★ | 9★ |
China is by far the easiest country for stores. Most other countries can work at high demand: 103 of the 135 break even at 80% demand with 10★ or less. At 1★, only China, Denmark, Finland and Iceland break even at 80%, and the last three only by a few dollars a day.
When Stores Get Overloaded
At 85% demand, the game warns that your stores in that country are overloaded and suggests opening another store there so visitors spread across more stores. Don’t. Every store in a country earns or loses the same amount at that country’s demand, so a new store just adds one more losing store, and buying it pushes demand up a little further. Upgrading, the warning’s other suggestion, also pushes demand up with every click, and at very high demand a higher-star store loses more.
Selling is the only way to bring demand back down, and how well it works depends on the country:
- In about half of the countries, the drop is small. Selling down to one store cuts demand by a twentieth (90% becomes about 85%), and the more stores you keep, the less it moves. Selling one store out of ten barely changes anything.
- In others the drop is much bigger, and in some a sale more than halves demand.
- In some countries, including the USA, Japan, Germany and Denmark, selling stores raises demand.
Because the effect varies by country, save before you sell and check the 🔥 figure afterwards.
The sure fix is to sell every store in the country in one sale. That ends the losses for good, and as the next section shows, it currently pays very well. If you buy back in later, the country starts over from 0% demand and 1★.
Selling Stores
When you sell, each store pays 35% of the country’s store price for every store you own there, plus $15,000 per ★. The more stores you own in a country, the more each one sells for.
The game counts your stores before the sale, so always sell a country’s stores together in one sale. Ten stores sold one at a time bring in only a little over half as much as ten sold together. For example, ten stores in the USA, where a store costs $625,000, cost you $6.25 million and sell together for about $22 million. Once you own three or more stores in a country, selling them all returns more than you paid for them.
Stars add little to the price. A 60★ store sells for about $885,000 more than a 1★ store, against the roughly 30 times its price you spent upgrading it, so upgrades only pay off through the profit the store makes while you own it.
This is how sales pay out in the current version of the game. A patch could change it.