How to Play It's Just Groceries

The core loop

Each week in It's Just Groceries follows the same rhythm: build a schedule from your hour pool, place ad and endcap orders, then run the week day by day. Every shift, you assign your on-duty staff to tasks across the salesfloor — stocking backstock, zoning shelves, running registers, building displays, and handling whatever the day throws at you. At the end of the week, corporate compares your sales to a target. Beat it and you get more hours, a bigger ad budget, and harder goals. Miss it and the chaos meter starts to climb.

Building the schedule

Your hour pool is the most important resource in the game. Every employee has a home department, a pay rate, an experience level, and availability windows. When you draft the week, try to:

• Cover your busiest days (typically Friday, Saturday, and any day with a holiday event) with experienced staff.
• Avoid stacking too many high-rate employees on slow mornings — payroll comes out of your sales margin.
• Leave a small buffer of unscheduled hours so you can call someone in when an event spikes traffic.
• Watch for burnout: scheduling the same person for six closes in a row tanks morale and increases the chance they quit.

Orders, ads, and endcaps

Ordering is where most new players lose money. Every department has a backstock capacity and a shelf capacity. If you order heavy when the backroom is already full, the overflow becomes spoilage or write-offs. If you order light during an ad week, you stock out, customers leave, and your sales goal slips away.

• Ads drive a department's traffic for the week. Place ads on departments you can actually keep stocked.
• Endcaps are high-visibility displays that sell 4× faster when the department is zoned. A non-zoned endcap still trickles stock from backstock, but it won't keep up with a real rush.
• Light vs heavy orders: light is safe and cheap, heavy is for ad weeks and holidays. When in doubt, order light.

Running the day

During a shift, your on-duty staff sit in an assignment panel. Each task you give them — stocking, zoning, register, backroom, customer service — consumes shift time and produces a different outcome. Stocking moves backstock to shelves so customers can actually buy it. Zoning faces and fronts the shelves, which speeds endcap restock and improves the customer experience score. Registers convert shoppers into sales; understaffed registers mean longer lines, lost baskets, and complaints.

Shrink, spoilage, and write-offs

Three slow leaks eat into your profit: shrink (theft and damage), spoilage (perishables that sat too long), and write-offs (overstocked or damaged inventory). Customer service coverage cuts shrink. Tighter ordering cuts spoilage. Zoning and recovery cut write-offs. You'll never get any of them to zero, but a well-run week keeps the total below about 3% of sales.

Events and the chaos meter

Events are the heart of the game. Inspectors, customer complaints, equipment failures, lawsuits, weather, and visits from corporate all surface as decision popups. Every choice has a consequence — sometimes immediate, sometimes a cascade that plays out over several days. The chaos meter rises when you ignore problems, lose employees, or stock out repeatedly. High chaos increases the chance of new bad events firing, so it's worth spending a little money or labor to knock it down before it snowballs.

Morale, rapport, and turnover

Employees aren't interchangeable. Each one builds rapport with the coworkers they share shifts with, and good rapport unlocks faster task completion and special event dialogue. Morale goes down when you overwork people, schedule them outside their availability, or assign them to a department they hate. Low-morale employees call out, work slower, and eventually quit — and replacing them through the interview system costs you days of productivity.

Hitting the weekly goal

The fastest way to grow is a simple flywheel: cover your sales goal → unlock more hours and ad budget → use that budget on departments you can keep stocked → cover the next, larger goal. Avoid the trap of pumping ads into a department that's already stocking out; you'll pay for traffic that walks out empty-handed.

Tips for new managers

• Front-load stocking early in the day so shelves are full when traffic peaks.
• Keep at least one experienced cashier on every shift.
• Zone the departments that have endcaps; the 4× restock is huge.
• Don't ignore small complaints — they cascade into lawsuits if you stack three of the same kind.
• Save your hire slots for departments where you've lost a veteran, not for filler.

More

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