The Best Starting Business in Big Ambitions

The question hides two different questions: what is cheapest to open, and what is cheapest to run well. The table answers the first with numbers; the rest of the page is about the second.

Every retail business, ranked by the cost of opening the door

“To open” is the cheapest fixture of each required kind — including the counter a cash register has to sit on — plus the cheapest shelf for whichever single product is cheapest to start with (the table names it). “Every main product” is what it costs to give each product a shelf of its own, which the wiki says is how capacity works: it does not add up across products. “Serves” is the tightest fixture in that full list, the number of customers the shop can take at once before something queues. Click any business to change the building or the products.

Prices are the community wiki’s recorded list prices for Early Access 0.9; the store assignments behind them have not moved. Rent, deposit and stock are on top and vary by unit.

Why the cheapest row is not the answer

Three things the total does not show:

• Security. Clothing, electronics, gifts and jewellery all carry a security-guard recommendation on their wiki pages, because high-value stock gets stolen. That is a second wage the florist and the bookstore never pay. Of the four, only the gift shop keeps the cheap end of its range — cheap gifts on a $500 product panel — low enough that a guard is a choice rather than a need.
• Staff. Every business here needs a customer-service hire. The hairdresser also needs a stylist and the nightclub a DJ, which is two salaries before the first customer.
• Finishing the range. A fast food restaurant’s cheapest door is a drinks fridge selling only soda, which is not a restaurant; a burger station takes it to $2,770, and every product stocked is above $28,000. A coffee shop is the same shape. Those are second-shop businesses: fine to grow into, punishing as a first lease.
• The queue. A clothing store’s cheapest rack serves five customers at once and a gift shop’s product panel ten, against a building that allows fifteen. The “Serves” column is where the first re-investment goes.

The three within $150 of each other

Florist — the pick. Two main products, cheap and expensive flowers. $2,020 to open, $2,470 to stock both, one cashier, no security note on its wiki page. It is the only business in the table whose complete range costs less than most businesses’ first shelf.

Bookstore. The cheapest door at $1,920, because a small bookshelf is $350. But it sells six kinds of book and each needs its own shelf, so the full range is $3,670 and the shop does not look like a bookstore until you have bought most of them.

Gift shop. $2,070 to open, $3,770 for all three products. The wiki’s own line on it is that at the current stage of the game it is “considered one of the easiest businesses to generate profit”, and it takes a security guard only if you stock the expensive gifts. If you trust that note more than the fifty dollars, open this one and keep the expensive shelf empty.

A fruit and vegetable store belongs in this bracket by requirements — baskets, a register, a scale — but its produce sits in crates on display stands rather than on shelves, a model the calculator does not price, so it is not in the table.

What Hovgaard changed that bears on this

• Gyms got an early-game buff. In Early Access 0.11 gyms were given soda and energy drinks to sell without an extra employee, and the studio said outright the change was meant to make them “a more viable choice for early game income”. The gym is not in the table because its equipment is listed only by category on the wiki, so no floor price can be computed — but it is the one business the developer has explicitly pointed first-timers toward.
• Loans got harder. 1.0 raised the income needed to qualify and the rates and minimum daily payments. The old route of borrowing your way into a bigger first shop is narrower than it was, which is another vote for the $2,000 door.

Related

• Startup cost calculator — the same numbers for any business in any building
• Getting started — the order to do things in once the shop is chosen
• Most profitable business — the opposite question: what to grow into