Worker Costs: Is Hiring Worth It?

What does a worker actually do for your lot?

A worker covers one of the two repetitive jobs in the loop: keeping shelves stocked, or selling to customers. Which one they take over changes what the hire is worth, because the two jobs become your bottleneck at different points.

Before the hire, ask which of these describes your last few minutes:

• Shelves keep going empty while you are serving. You need coverage on stocking.
• A queue forms while you are restocking. You need coverage on selling.
• Neither. You are not throughput-limited yet, so a worker adds cost without adding sales.

Worker reference table

The column that matters most is role. Two workers at the same price can be worth very different amounts depending on whether the job they cover is the one slowing you down that session.

How to measure whether a hire paid off

Do it in four steps, and do it once per worker rather than trusting a ranking:

1. Note your cash balance and take a rough reading of earnings per minute before hiring.
2. Hire exactly one worker.
3. Let the lot run for the same length of time and read earnings again.
4. Compare the increase against the hire cost. If the gap closes in a session, hire another; if it does not, the bottleneck was somewhere else.

The reason to hire one at a time is that two workers can mask a bad first hire — you see income rise and never learn which role was actually the constraint.

Hiring versus buying more stock

Both raise income, and they compete for the same cash. The difference is what they fix:

• More stock raises the ceiling on how much you can sell per restock. It does nothing while you are away from the counter.
• A worker raises how much of that ceiling you actually convert, including while you are busy expanding or away from the lot.

So the order is usually: stock first, until shelves stay full; then the worker that covers the step you cannot keep up with; then more stock again at the new volume.

When a worker is the wrong purchase

Three cases where the hire is a trap:

• Your lot is half empty. The worker has nothing to sell; fix supply first.
• You are at the counter constantly and still selling everything. The constraint is stock, not labour.
• You are saving for an expansion that will change how many workers you need. Buying a worker you will have to re-plan around is wasted cash.

Related

• How to play — where hiring sits in the loop.
• Tree prices — the supply side of the same decision.
• Upgrade order — expansions that change your staffing needs.