Big Ambitions Opening Hours Cheatsheet

Opening hours are a profit stat hiding in a calendar widget. Rent is paid either way. Stock is already on the shelf. The only question is whether a wage at 11 p.m. buys a customer. This page is a format-by-format bias for Big Ambitions 1.0. Your save’s Econoview beats any sentence here after one test week.

Community dumps of day and hour multipliers exist and go stale. The method does not: look at hourly customers, then staff only the hours that move the needle. Pair this with employees and make money.

Retail default: long hours

Gift shops, liquor, jewelry, clothing, tobacco, florists — if the building already has stock and checkouts, extra cashier hours are usually cheap relative to a dark store. 24/7 is the common veteran call for these formats. The exception is a tiny A1 you cannot staff without paying more than the overnight tickets.

Seven days beats five. A shop that closes Sunday hands the district to whoever stayed open. Copy rival closed hours when you can staff them.

Mastering marketing and traffic in Big Ambitions

Food: move the window

Tutorial 8 a.m.–4 p.m. is an office shift, not a restaurant shift. Fast food and similar kitchens often want late afternoon through late evening on a single-shift budget. If you can afford two shifts, cover lunch and dinner, not dawn. Overnight food labour is a common silent loss.

Coffee can be a morning-weighted exception. Watch the first three days before you copy a liquor-store 24/7 onto a bakery.

Gyms, clubs, cinemas

Gyms frequently show near-zero traffic in the deep night. Paying a trainer from midnight to 6 a.m. is how a “healthy” business bleeds. Fill the gaps your rivals leave at peak instead.

Nightclubs are weekend-weighted. A Tuesday afternoon club is a lighting bill. Staff Thursday–Sunday hard; keep a skeleton or a close on dead weekdays if Econoview agrees.

Cinemas and theatres (0.10+) follow evening blocks more than supermarket logic. Do not 24/7 a screen house because a gift-shop video told you to.

Offices and HQ

Law desks, HR, purchasing agents, logistics — these are daytime, weekday creatures. Headquarters in particular uses a business calendar. An agent “doing nothing” on Sunday is on schedule, not broken. See headquarters.

Factories and warehouses

Production can run long if shops can receive. If every destination is closed, you are paying workers to stack pallets for Monday. Align factory shifts with the warehouses truck loop and the shops you feed.

Marketing is not hours

Traffic plus ads fill promotion up to 100%. Hours decide whether those promoted people arrive to a locked door. Max marketing on a 8–4 food shop still misses the dinner spike. Fix the calendar before you buy City Ads.

A one-week test protocol

1. Staff your best guess for three days.
2. Read hourly customers, not the 7-day blur.
3. Cut any hour that is wage-only.
4. Add any hour where rivals are closed and you still see demand.
5. Only then lock the template for shop two.

If you hate micro, pick a 24/7 retail format from the tier list and stop thinking about calendars until you own a club. If you love micro, this page is the whole game.

Numbers will move in patches. When 1.0 hotfixes land, re-run the three-day test, do not wait for a wiki cell to update. For the announcement-era city, also skim version 1.0.

If two shops share a basket, their hours can still differ. A Garment gift shop next to a subway may justify dawn coverage that a Midtown jewelry room does not. Do not clone one calendar across the company just because HQ likes tidy spreadsheets. Write hours per address, then steal the good template only after both Econoviews agree. That is the whole tool: a bias, a test, a lock, and a refusal to treat 8–4 as a personality.