Shifts outline the kind of job a given employee is meant to be doing for as long as they’re on that shift assignment. Shifts typically last one season¹⁾.

Intentionally quite broad, shift assignments and what they require can be interpreted liberally. As long as customers are happy and able to complete their purchases, your creative use of orange juice as a cleaning fluid will most likely be tolerated. Provided the floor stains are gone, your creative use of a sticky fruit juice to keep customers in place for longer browsing and increased odds of impulse-purchasing is just an added bonus.

Emporium, like all superstores, is a store with many needs. The precise needs of the store may change depending on the season and the staff available, but one thing’s certain: there’s always plenty to do. As the newest crop of employees, these are the options available to you in your first season at the store. As the seasonal cycle continues, you may be offered options not found on the list below.

Sometimes referred to as janitorial duty, clean-up isn’t the most glamorous shift, but it is absolutely necessary for successful upkeep of the store. It’s important to make sure the store is spic and span - nothing spoils a shopping trip for customers quite like overflowing garbage, or mysterious floor stains in the aisles. Clean-up duty involves all the various cleaning tasks at the store, including cleaning up active messes or making sure that areas of the store have received their regular cleaning.

There are cleaning supply cupboards across the store to help employees with easy access to supplies, including warning signs for a variety of different clean-up situations. No one wants a customer to slip on an unmarked spillage while clean-up are replenishing their bleach supplies. Those customers might be inclined to complain.

Employees on this shift may run into Jo Planter. Just try not to literally run into her - her head's cactus spines are very sharp!

Unfortunately, and despite best efforts, not all customers have the seamless experience at Emporium that we wish they could have. However, it’s very important that Emporium maintains its stellar reputation across the multiverse. That’s where the customer complaints division comes in. Rather than letting customer frustrations simmer, the job of customer complaints is to listen to what those customers want to complain about and, ideally, make some effort to either resolve the problem, find another solution, or find some other free comfort that customers might be placated by, like a free sample, or a fun pamphlet.

Those with a shift on customer complaints will likely start off at the illusive customer complaints desk, but may choose to position themselves elsewhere in the store, provided it is made clear what the employee is there to do.

While Emporium is in no way a hospital, it does sell a range of medicines and quality-of-life health improvers, like glasses for all types and numbers of eyes, and edible plasters. Some medicines require a prescription or proof of need, and cannot be handed out to just any Entity. Employees on a pharmacy shift are required to watch over the medicines, help give or guesstimate helpful health advice and associated products, and offer a listening appendage.

Some medicines at the Emporium pharmacy are particularly coveted, and so random and frequent stock checks are required.

Sometimes a totally new product has just landed. Big problem - no one’s heard of it! How is anyone going to know they want to buy this if they haven’t heard of it yet? That’s where employees on a promotions shift come in. From offering free samples to hanging posters, leaving carefully whispered suggestions around just the right corners, setting up tasteful and appropriate displays, and reformatting parts of the store to make it that much easier, promotions spend a lot of time making the great products of Emporium look great. Whether it’s a product that management have specifically asked employees to encourage the purchase of, a whole department whose sales are lower than they should be, or using your own gumption to find products that are full of merit but just aren’t selling well and need some love, there’s plenty to do.

If customers aren’t sure quite what to buy, that’s yet another opportunity to promote a product and offer a helpful leaflet!

Aren’t the Emporium shelves lovely? So many shelves for so many products, and so many customers buying so many products. As lovely as the shelves are, there are few things quite as tragic as an empty shelf. That’s where the restocking shifts come in. Employees on a restocking shift must make sure to replenish shelves with products before those products run out on the shelves, move products between shelves to help follow a new promotion or other requirement (e.g. an aisle becoming too hazardous to allow for safe customer browsing), or sometimes remove products which have been recalled, have expired, or are otherwise unsellable.

Employees on a restocking shift may need to venture into the Warehouses to get that new stock to replenish shelves with.

The returns section of Emporium is a dark place, full of sadness, screams, and despair. It’s no wonder: after leaving Emporium, some customers have returned to the long, long queue to get back in so that they can return something that is defective, doesn’t meet requirements, or wasn’t an appreciated holiday gift. Employees on a shift in returns need to make sure that the returns queue is kept orderly, and customers are given an opportunity to exchange or change their minds about the return in as many different ways as possible, all while remaining polite and just the right level of pushy.

A returns shift may also require returned goods to be repackaged and reshelved, or put back in the Warehouses.

Emporium wants its customers and employees to feel safe and secure, both from dangers lurking in the store that the store makes a point of not mentioning to customers wherever possible, and other customers. It’s the job of anyone on a security shift to negate problems that are at risk of getting violent (or already are). Above all else, security’s job is to ensure that nothing is stolen from the store, either by customers or by employees. Everything has its price, and stealing comes with many consequences.

Those on a security shift are encouraged only to use violence as a last resort. Restraining problematic Entities is much better than physically attacking them. Assaulting customers without being given due cause is frowned upon, especially when it’s not the only option available. To that end, and following several customer complaints, security are not given weapons of any kind.

Please note that the security system, including CCTV, is overseen by the helpful store AI, Albert. The Security Station is located near the Atrium and the head of Security, Phloupostrophe the Ever Watchful, He Who Took The Meek And Defenseless Under His Wings, Smiter of Fears, Banisher of Winter’s Harshness, Cantor in The Song of Peace (A.K.A. “Flopsie”), can usually be found there.

The Empty Vessel cafe is a warm, pleasant place. It’s your job to keep it that way. From keeping the tables and chairs clean and in one piece, to getting more muffins when they’ve run out, it can get surprisingly hectic here. Customers come in asking for all sorts of strange beverages to be prepared, and there are all sorts of equally strange supplies with which to attempt to do this.

Above all else, do what you’re doing with cheer and a smile. We want customers to feel just how pleasant the cafe is.

A shift at the cafe will usually entail you staying in the cafe for most of your shift. However, it doesn’t necessitate staying in the same location. For example, if you want to restock something (like all those free napkins people keep taking), promote the cafe to customers in other parts of the store, or take out the cafe trash, those are just three reasons why you could be on shift but not find yourself stuck in the same location.

The Warehouses are a difficult and dangerous place to navigate, but Emporium depends on goods being sourced from their infinite depths, checked and returned in case of damage, and kept safe from Cryptid populations that inhabit the Deep Stockrooms. In addition, whatever forces keep the Warehouses stocked and contained are temperamental, requiring constant supervision, care, and occasional pruning back. Shifts in the Warehouses include traveling to difficult-to-access locations for retrievals and restocking of products lurking deeper in the Warehouse, clean-up of infestations of self-replicating goods, and ‘repair’ of the great and inexplicable engines that keep the Warehouses operational. For major operations, groups of employees on Warehouse duty are sometimes sent out on Excursions together; in other cases, individual employees are attached to existing planned Excursions.

The shift you're on describes the flavour of thing(s) you should be trying to deal with in the store, rather than specific tasks that you have been given for that shift. You can apply that flavour to different parts of the store as you see fit, which may lead to an Excursion or other bizarre interactions.

Shift work may include:

• Finding an area of the store and applying what you're meant to be doing to that area - investigating products that need promoting, cleaning the crystal statues until they really sparkle, offering a listening ear to customers who want to complain, etc.
  • Some shifts may be tied to a more specific location, such as working at the Complaints Desk, The Empty Vessel (unless you’re restocking it), or a shift in the Warehouse, but most will not be specific to a single location.
• Applying what you're meant to be doing on shift to dealing with with negative disturbances in the store not necessarily covered by the Taskboard e.g. investigating and resolving a bad rumour mentioned on the Collective Consciousness
• If you’re feeling proactive, you might take more action in the location that you’re in to complete your shift. For example, if you’re on clean-up duty, you might start scrubbing the floor, ceiling, and look for products that are particularly filthy from being on the shelves for so long.

You don’t need to put much effort in to do the bare minimum. For example, if you’re on clean-up duty, it’s enough to be in a section of the store and mention in the location channel that you’re starting to mop there, while focusing primarily on network antics or look for the product of your dreams on the shelves you’re passing while mopping. At least some nod to what you’re on shift to do is enough to achieve the bare minimum.

Employees can prioritise non-shift work, including:

• Helping to resolve tasks on the Taskboard, whether or not it's immediately relevant to what shift you're assigned
• Helping at least one customer

If an employee is not doing any of the above but can justify how what they were doing was of significant benefit to the store, relevant to their shift, helping a customer, or resolving a Taskboard task, then that is also fine.

Employees must spend their major turnsheet action doing something related to their work, or something that can be justifiably connected to their work. Employees who bunk off in turnsheets and do not put significant effort into covering this up or justifying it as valuable will not receive their seasonal pay of 1 SoulCoin.

Bunking off is also an option, but is against the Employee Handbook rules. In addition to losing out on your pay, there may be other IC consequences. If you can sufficiently justify how what you were doing was of benefit to the store, store management will likely take you at your word. Bunking off in session is covered by the relevant turnsheet section. If you're bunking off or doing something not obviously related to your job in turnsheet, let us know in the action how you're planning to justify this. GMs will be nice and give your character leeway within reason.

Small actions in areas do not need GM adjudication. Examples include, but are not limited to, moving objects around, general cleaning, getting a cup of coffee, or distributing leaflets.

However, please wait for a GM to respond to you when you try and do something major in whatever location you’re in. Examples include investigating something, looking for something in pharmacy storage, trying to change the environment in a big way, dismantling a display, burrowing under the shelving, and so on. Your actions may trigger a linear, and exactly what will trigger a linear will not be easy to predict (there are strange things lurking on every shelf and around every corner, after all). The GMs would rather give you a choice as to whether you want to actually start a linear or not. If in doubt, just ask a GM!

A shift will typically last for one season. In other words: the combination of one uptime and the following downtime. There may be exceptional circumstances that will push Emporium to ask you to switch shifts. However, from an OC perspective you are always able to refuse. The most important thing is to have fun with what you’re doing, and if you don’t think you’d enjoy what’s being asked of you IC, you’re always allowed to push back. We just ask that you make it obvious to GMs if you IC resent your shift, but are OC enjoying yourself, or are OC unhappy, as we are keen to help in the latter case!

When it’s time for a new shift assignment, the GMs will give you 2-3 choices to choose from. One of these will likely be something you’ve just been doing; unless there’s a very good reason why your return to that assignment has been made unviable²⁾. The other option(s) will lead on from actions you’ve taken, including proficiencies you’ve demonstrated.

For example: This turn, you were on clean-up duty. You excelled at dealing with that huge orange juice spill that was threatening to flood the baking goods aisle, so your options for next time are:

1. Stay on clean-up - You’re clearly great at it
2. Customer complaints - Some would say that complaints aren’t conventional messes, but they still need cleaning up!
3. Restocking - The store needs your many arms for restocking the many shelves, and there are a lot of baking goods that need to be replaced after the orange juice flood got so many aisles

Note that if you chose to work in restocking you wouldn’t be obliged to fix the specific problem outlined in your options, and could choose to restock a completely different part of the store. It is also not a given that any problem will be outlined in shift assignment options; the shift option may simply be given without further context.

You are also not obliged to pick any of the options you have been given. The most important thing to us is that you’re having fun, and not forced to do something IC that would go against that OC. If none of the options sound like they could be fun for you, please let a GM know as soon as possible - ideally a day or two before the Thursday at 23:59 BST deadline for letting us know what you’re picking. You don’t need to explain why, and you don’t need to have anything in mind if you want an alternative. However, if you do have any ideas for something you think you would enjoy more, please let us know. This doesn’t have to be something specific (e.g. “I want to work in clean-up”), and could be more general (e.g. “I want to go somewhere I’m more likely to get into fights”).

Shifts are assigned at two different points:

1. Before the start of the game. You have two choices: either you can pick something specific further up this page (please mention this on your character submission form or email us with your preference after your character has been approved), or you can choose to have something randomly assigned to you. If you choose to have something randomly assigned, you will not be given a choice about what you get, so if you have any preferences or things you definitely don’t want to play, you need to let the GMs know (again, via email or your character submission form).
2. By the Tuesday between sessions (e.g. for Turn 1 with uptime on August 3rd, you would be told by August 10th). This will be sent to you on your private GM channel on the Discord server, and we will send a general email out when all employees have received this, so no need to keep checking! Depending on your actions both during uptime and on your turnsheet, you’ll be given 2-3 options to choose from. Please get back to us with the shift you want to select by that Thursday, 23:59 BST, with your choice and by @ing your GM in your private GM channel on Discord. And, as mentioned in the previous section, if you don’t find any of the options fun or appealing, please let a GM know as soon as possible so we can work with you to find a better choice.

The store may ask for people to change shift if there’s an emergency, but these changes will be voluntary.

For every shift, an employee will have regularly scheduled break periods. Each employee can have regular shorter breaks³⁾, and periodic longer breaks⁴⁾, typically used for sleeping by those employees who need to do that. While employees have maximum break lengths, there is no minimum break length. No employee is obliged to take a break. Some employees are known to work without sleep or rest, but this is a tiring job, and naps can be an intriguing new experience. For employee characters with the Somniac Quirk, it will be assumed that you take time to sleep during the longer break unless you specifically state otherwise⁵⁾.

While on break, employees are welcome to take off their uniform and nametag. Employees are also welcome to peruse the various goods on sale at Emporium and make purchases, just like any other customer.

As part of shift work, employees can choose to check the Taskboard to see some problems which have been flagged as particularly urgent and in need of more in depth attention.