Business Simulator

Open to Buy

Fern & Field is yours.

Eleven hundred square feet on a main street, a stockroom that is fuller than the bank account, and rent due on the first.

Twelve months, one decision each. The thing to hold onto is that in retail every dollar you own is sitting on a shelf. Buying merchandise is not an expense. It is cash converted into cardboard, and it only becomes a cost on the day something sells. That gap is why a shop can post a profitable month with an empty account, and why January can lose money and still fill the till.

Turns beat margin: a 60-point margin at one and a half turns a year loses to a 40-point margin at five. Two of the bars move at different speeds, and the difference is the whole game. Newness on the floor sells today and only receipts refill it, while the quality of your buying moves the street’s opinion of you at about a third of the gap a month. Markdowns are not failure; late markdowns are. Rent is fixed forever and sales are not. Every year plays out differently, but there is no luck in the outcome: if the stockroom is a storage unit by October, the decision that put it there was made in a showroom in January.