Typerofdoom's Guide to Hiring a Shopkeeper

Still not convinced? Well, too bad for you, you must be either not be very interested or just not own a shop. If you are one (or both) of the above, I suggest you leave now...

Now, there are a few basic steps to finding yourself a reliable and hard-working slav- er, shopkeeper, and they are listed below, put into five easy steps for your convenience. Have fun and good luck finding your perfect employee!

Step one: Decide what kind of shopkeeper would be best for your shop

Before you go running off to hire a shopkeeper, there are a few things you need to decide, nothing brain-bustingly hard like those darn Lenny Conundrums, just some simple things like, do I want or have a shop “theme” in which I want to incorporate my shopkeeper? This is a major issue when choosing your employee, because, sad as it may seem, plushie Kau shopkeepers do not seem to fit particularly well with a space themed shop. Another important question would be; which kind of keepers are the most trustworthy with which items? For example, a Jetsam would not be a suitable petpet shopkeeper, as they have a really nasty habit of eating all the poor, defenseless petpets you happen to stock! See what I mean? Choosing a good shop manager isn’t as easy as you may have thought, huh? Anyways, now, you should carefully look over all the aspects of your shop and narrow your list of acceptable keepers down to around oh, say three to five different species of neopets/petpets/faeries. Once you’ve done this, you should be ready for step two.

Step two: Get the word out

This is the tricky part, the actual finding of the interesting employees, I personally recommend placing an ad in the Neopian Times or maybe a little poster on the notice board to get your message out on the streets. Make sure your ad is: a) nice to look at b) filled with the right information (contacts, job requirements... etc.) c) not too long (too many words is not a good thing) nor too short, either (you need enough words to make your message clear), and last of all, NO CHATSPEAK!!! I cannot stress this enough; chatspeak gives the impression of someone who is not very serious at all about their ad because they’re too lazy to write properly! Abbreviations are acceptable, if you don’t use them too often. Okay, done all that? Great, time to move on to step three.

Step three: Job interviews

As any successful shop owner will tell you, an interview is a great way to get an idea of the personality of your possible employee. I suggest using straightforward questions such as, “WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT DO YOU WANT?” But I’ve learned from often painful experience that the applicants, especially the Grarrls, Jetsams, and Skeiths, do not appreciate this and have a rather violent way of showing it. So you’d be much better off to go with something like, “Hello, nice to see you, please step into my office...” and then you would ask boring stuff like, “Do you have any references/previous employers?” and “How much do you expect to be paid?” Also, a good question to ask is “What do you plan on saying to greet shoppers?” That’s a very good question, as it tells you how the shopkeeper would treat your valued customers and that is vital to your shop’s success. The interviewing may be long and tedious, but it is well worth it. You learn A LOT about the applicant’s character, their salary expectations (if they ask for more neopoints than the food store pays its employees, kick them out right away, do you hear me? Right away!) Their goals in life (the boring part where they tell you like, “I one day hope to drive a truck through the Haunted Woods” and other dumb stuff like that...) Now this takes a while, depending on how many applicants there are and how long you play on neopets each day, but if you do about two each day, you should be done by the end of the week, possibly sooner. All done? If you are, good for you and if not, well, you might as well come along and read the next few bits anyway...

Step four: Weed out the unworthy/unsuitable applicants

This is also another tricky bit, as it’s easy to be torn between two great applicants. When this happens, try flipping a coin; coins know everything. Now, in this step, you should be thinking about your various applicants and revisiting step one, to try and narrow the list down some more.

If you’ve still got two or more neopets/petpets/faeries that qualify after reviewing step one, you should start asking yourself questions like, “Which one asks for the least amount of money?” and “How many holidays/benefits does each one expect?” This really puts things into perspective and it should leave you with one winning applicant! If not, remember, there’s always the coin... Now you should be ready for the very last step.

Step five: Hire your shopkeeper!

So, you’ve chosen your type of shopkeeper, you’ve typed out your advertisement, survived the dangerous job interviews and weeded out the unworthy candidates; now it’s time to take the final step, and hire your brand new shopkeeper! For this step, there is only one thing that matters... Neopoints! You want to save as much neopoints on your shopkeeper as possible! DO NOT be afraid to bargain hard for salary price; remember, this is a war, you are the good guy, trying to save your neopoints for other more useful purposes like taking over the wor- I mean renovating the Soup Kitchen. The new shopkeeper is the evil one, trying to rob you of your hard earned neopoints- DO NOT LET THEM!!! I think that’s about all you need to know. Now go on, shoo! Go get yourself a fabulous new shopkeeper of your very own! Have fun!

Author’s note: Well, there it is, hopefully my second article to get published in the Neopian Times; I hope you liked it as much as I enjoyed writing it! Some of this advice is applicable on neopets, but most, the advertising/interviewing part, sadly can’t be done, but I guess you could always pretend... Anyways I just wanted to clear that up, and if you have any questions or comments about this article or my previous one, feel free to neomail me and I’ll do my best to answer them. Have a nice day!