Business licensing and it's current state

[Smilesville]

The only way to fix this is to remove it entirely.

 

Lowering the cost to 10%, 1%, it won't matter in the face of the fact that business licensing is just not an engaging avenue of RP for anyone - except the 1% of the community that finds some deeper meaning in spending their days referencing every business ad with a list to check whether their license has lapsed. We can blame the fall of the previous licensing attempts on Rockford and Co, but they really only accelerated what was going to happen anyways.

 

It's about as asinine as scripted seatbelts.

 

There are so many other things we could be working on - it's honestly disappointing to see licensing crop up again.

[Bombie]

Hi friends, everyone agrees that there are some prices that are steep - luckily we have @Preservist and @Pogis who are currently changing things around to make it fair. I'll admit it was my mistake for not communicating the prices better with FM/GOV as I've been busy for a few weeks, so don't blame or raise your pitchforks at them! 

 

18 minutes ago, Preservist said:

Business Licensing was being prepared to launch as of today, March 1st.

However, due to the feedback we've received on the initial fees (which were also approved by Property Management), the license fees will be lowered in order to take more complex businesses (such as nightclubs and stripclubs) into account, which generally require more preperation and have lower income due to higher staff costs. While it is hard to strike a fair balance with the currently varying income of different business types, we'll try our best to come up with a system that doesn't penalize any in particular.

The City of Los Santos as a faction doesn't intend to take the fun out of business roleplay or to make them unprofitable.
For the time being businesses aren't required to apply for a license.

Thank you for everyone's input so far!

 

[Gambler]

5 minutes ago, Smilesville said:

The only way to fix this is to remove it entirely.

 

Lowering the cost to 10%, 1%, it won't matter in the face of the fact that business licensing is just not an engaging avenue of RP for anyone - except the 1% of the community that finds some deeper meaning in spending their days referencing every business ad with a list to check whether their license has lapsed. We can blame the fall of the previous licensing attempts on Rockford and Co, but they really only accelerated what was going to happen anyways.

 

It's about as asinine as scripted seatbelts.

 

There are so many other things we could be working on - it's honestly disappointing to see licensing crop up again.

I actually agree. Because when you think about it, after applying for a business, you also apply for a SHOP MENU and you pay money for it. The you pay money again to use it legally?  Kinda not the right move.

 

Edited March 1, 2021 by Gambler

[Bombie]

I don't agree that licensing should be removed. Some businesses out there are making money out of thin air, and there has to be a drawback and what better than an in-character one? The problem lies between the lines, as business are unique it is very hard to distinguish what should pay more, what should pay less. 

Clubs, for example, are very sporadic. You can have a successful opening that draws in heaps of money, or an opening where you end up spending a lot of money on employees, drinks and so on. 

[slump]

Does anyone have the info for what licensing was before, like price, frequency? I /heard/ that it was around 10k ish as an annual payment? Honestly if you even drop it to 10-20k per license for a monthly fee that seems reasonable. You can make that in one or two openings on any business. 

[Smilesville]

6 minutes ago, Bombie said:

I don't agree that licensing should be removed. Some businesses out there are making money out of thin air, and there has to be a drawback and what better than an in-character one?

If anything comes out of thin air, it's the arbitrary bonus provided for every person walking in the door. We can start with doing away with this - it was only ever a temporary solution to the underlying problem of 'some realistic businesses aren't profitable,' wasn't it? If the server has trouble attracting certain types of businesses that we as a server desire, shouldn't our effort go toward finding a script solution?

 

The funding necessary to start a business and get everything in order is downside enough - that money was made elsewhere, and is a substantial amount of 'skin in the game' to stake on your business idea.

Edited March 1, 2021 by Smilesville

[Tsarna]

7 minutes ago, Smilesville said:

If anything comes out of thin air, it's the arbitrary bonus provided for every person walking in the door. We can start with doing away with this - it was only ever a temporary solution to the underlying problem of 'some realistic businesses aren't profitable,' wasn't it? If the server has trouble attracting certain types of businesses that we as a server desire, shouldn't our effort go toward finding a script solution?

 

The funding necessary to start a business and get everything in order is downside enough - that money was made elsewhere, and is a substantial amount of 'skin in the game' to stake on your business idea.

Just out of curiosity. How do bars get money then? 
Scene A - owner takes in staff to work in a bar, no 20k opening bonus (if 20 people come by) - they sell drinks, which they buy for 50-150, depends on the drink, and sell them for 200-350. So they making 100-200 bonus by every customers, which comes to maximum 4000, if everybody buys the most expensive drink. How ya pay your staff for the two hours? 
Scene B - the owner sells his alcohol himself, does not take any staff, and makes 3000-4000 per opening. Is that good enough for a business owner? Which will mean, that every single food place/drink place will not hire nobody to work there, because they simply can not pay the people, if you do not have a script in there, which pays 4000 gov. bonus.
Brining back the door fees is not an option, because it was stupid anyways. 

Edited March 1, 2021 by Tsarna

[L I C E]

As someone who owns a tool store, lol, expecting me to pay 30000 for 3 months is ridiculous. The main profit I make is from the tool store 4k per hour rped script, the profit from the business itself is tiny. Are they seriously expecting me to hand over 30k for 3 months when I've not even cleared 5k in 2 weeks?

[Smilesville]

2 minutes ago, Tsarna said:

Just out of curiosity. How do bars get money then? 
Scene A - owner takes in staff to work in a bar, no 20k opening bonus (if 20 people come by) - they sell drinks, which they buy for 50-150, depends on the drink, and sell them for 200-350. So they making 100-200 bonus by every customers, which comes to maximum 4000, if everybody buys the most expensive drink. How ya pay your staff for the two hours? 
Scene B - the owner sells his alcohol himself, does not take any staff, and makes 3000-4000 per opening. Is that good enough for a business owner? 
Brining back the door fees is not an option, because it was stupid anyways. 

They benefit from the business script I mentioned earlier - they make roughly 2k per person who walks in the door. That's the only money out of thin air I see in businesses.

 

Owning a bar isn't a lucrative enterprise in real life - I work in coordination with them regularly, and the net profit margin is somewhere in the 10-15% area (that is - for every dollar of sale, they make ten to fifteen cents of profit after expenses.) It's not unusual to close the business with sales totalling the $20-30k range.

 

They're able to achieve success by sheer volume.

 

The server does not, and will never have, the proper volume of customers to bring those numbers into line with regards to businesses that inherently possesses a lower profit margin. The only way to make those businesses profitable (in the absence of a script like the 2k-per-person) is controlling expenses - and for some businesses, this does indeed look like the owner operating everything himself. That's the difference between breaking even (your $4000 profit, minus paying a bartender $2k per hour, which is below the artificial script value) and an absolutely insane 200+5 profit margin. Throwing another expense (such as licensing) into the mix without careful consideration tightens that hoop that businesses relying on volume have to jump through - and you'll see a greater percentage of businesses become sole proprietorships in which the owner won't be hiring any help without the assistance of a script pumping money into the business.

 

The people who're really shafted by licensing are those who run businesses for the RP value without regard for whether they're making a substantial profit. We're told this is what we should aspire to, and yet the latest round of licensing proposals would thoroughly eliminate them.

 

At that point, licensing makes every single problem it pretends to address worse, in addition to not addressing the "cash from nowhere" argument.

[knppel]

Honestly, it's the economic state that demotivated me to operate the club and this is a further step in exactly the wrong direction.

And if I say that with a popular business that actually makes my character and the owner good money as it runs well, this counts double for "small" business (in terms of audience reach) that actually might struggle to finance themselves through their operations and revenue.

 

I could write a long ass essay but I won't right now.

In short what really causes the issues is the job market that makes businesses with government support paychecks much more profitable, and is not at all regulated (i.e. apply for government funding for so and so many staff rather than to jst create money by enlisting people, lol).

 

This makes labour the most profitable investment strategy, ironically (as additional workers in not-club businesses create money for the business rather than to cost the operator a wage).

 

Last but not least, the currency we use ingame plays in this, with some values fixed (/startshift salaries, estate prices) to arbitrarily decided values, but other values of the currency being not defined at all (people arguing that beer for 100 dollar is ridiculous when 100 dollar is nothing ig, people crying prostitutes charging minimum wage are unrealistic and so on) and other values arguable out of proportion (people being able to buy several grams of cocaine for an hour's work worth in a legal shitjob, expensive cars costing more than free market available estate).

I'll stop here as I said I'd not write long ass, but you all know what I mean without going into detail.

 

For me personally, it means I get financially rewarded ic for hosting mediocre parties with minimum effort, staff and rp opposed to throwing big parties and focus on making the scenery appealing to visitors. Due to ooc defined static money valus applied on some things.

Alternative, I metagame, cry to my online friends ooc and make them do the job for free. D'oh.

 

As the op spots correctly, I'd not be too touched with Malibu as Carry could still operate it profitable despite higher cost.

However whoever made this up should be made aware that less money in her, or any club operator's pocket, first of all means less investment in the rp sceneries in the businesses, not these characters cutting down on their sports cars cost.

Edited March 1, 2021 by knppel