Imagine this: you're going to buy something from Marnie's. Today is a day that the ranch is open, and it's within the hours that the store is run. You go to the ranch and Marnie's not at the till. I guess now you can't buy anything. Or: You're running low on wood, and you're either low on energy or there's not a lot of trees easy to get to for you to chop down. You're about to go to the carpenter shop to buy some, but then you remember, Robin's building a barn on your farm. There goes that option. The general theme is that since the stores only have one person working in them, and you can only buy/sell things if someone is at the till (even if they are in the same room), the player can easily miss out on shopping opportunities. Sometimes it's a big deal, and sometimes it's less of a big deal, but it's always an annoyance... So why not add some (lore-friendly) workarounds? Here's a few ideas, not all of which may be the most balanced (and especially I'm not suggesting that they are all used at the same time) For most item stores, there could be a catalog available if the owner isn't available. This can be a mail-order type system. You "place an order" at the store, and the next day, the things you bought can appear in your mailbox, or in a box next to the mailbox (like the parsnip seeds at the beginning of the game). NPCs other than the owner can run the till at times, and have alternating work schedules. This means that in the stores with this system, as long as the store is open you will always be able to make a purchase if you want to. If the store is open, and the store owner is within a certain range of the till (Marnie in her kitchen, Pierre near his shelves) then you can still interact with the till to make purchases, even if the store owner isn't at the till when you use it. Self-serve if the owner isn't available (a little less lore-friendly but has the same benefits of mail ordering with instant gratification) Changing the open hours of certain stores so that NPCs can do activities in the morning (added benefit of allowing the player to shop later in the evening) I doubt this lists every possibility but primarily I wanted to avoid saying "changing an NPCs schedule so they stand in one spot all day". If anything, some of these changes would allow NPCs like Pierre or Gus to have more varied schedules, instead of limited NPCs who already have varied schedules.
I think that time management is a central piece of the game, all these things you want to change mechanics are just made to be that way so we need to learn when and how be productive
a big aspect of this game is time management & making your own "systems to achieve what you want" (basicly.. manage your ingame life). all of the stuff you mentioned are part of the game & intented like that. and people like it because how it is. i know, sometimes it's annoying.. but it's part of the game. it even was like that in harvest moon years ago.
