WMG / Night of the Consumers

Lester's true fate.

Lester was the Employee of the Month when he was still working at the store, until he went missing. We see that the Manager is a perfectionist that obsessively wants to have the best store in town, and if you succeed in working your shift, he'll invite all of the other managers to show you off, considering you to be the next Employee of the Month if you keep it up. So, what happened to Lester again? That skeleton hidden in the stock room? That's him. The Manager kidnapped him when he tried to quit since he was carrying the store's reputation on his shoulders, and imprisoned him for his defiance. During his captivity, which according to the tally-marks on the wall was ninety days, Lester continuously scribbled "Don't trust the Manager" over and over on the wall to warn the next unfortunate soul who might stumble upon it of the Manager.

The other managers will serve as new "enemies" in an update.

When you complete your shift, the Manager decides to invite managers from other stores to show off your progress. In the next shift, the other managers will patrol the store, constantly stalking you, making sure you're on top of your work and not trying to cheese the game by hiding in the staff room, stocking all of the items except one of each category ahead of time, assaulting customers with the supply boxes or perhaps hunting for more easter eggs like the hidden stock room prison.

Future shifts

In addition to having to worry about other Managers prowling the store monitoring your every move, there would be some scenarios/crisis events those who worked in retail hell are all too familiar with:-

• A product is suddenly recalled for i.e. having unacceptably high levels of human waste in it, during the working day. You have to quickly grab the defective goods off the shelves before any of the Consumers purchase them, any sold results in instant-game over.

The subliminal messaging on some of the products is Lester warning you from beyond the grave.

A lot of the labels have very ominous warnings on them, encouraging you to "GET OUT" or suggesting that you're wasting away at this job. Considering the underlying Eldritch Location feeling of the store, the labels being changed could be some paranormal intervention from Lester, who died in the prison the Manager kept him in. He's aware of not only how soul-crushing the job is, but how dangerous the Manager is, and is trying to save an idealistic, innocent young person, the protagonist from the same fate.

Alternatively, the warnings are the protagonist hallucinating.

The protagonist is probably just imagining these warning labels, either due to fatigue or because they're aware that this is a dead-end, stressful job. This is probably just what's going through their mind realizing that it's not all that it's cracked up to be, dealing with annoying customers and strict crunch time, or went into the job already aware of what was coming.

Jimmy quit because he saw and heeded those warnings.

He, like you, saw the messages on the labels, and that, combined with all of the craziness in the store, made him snap and decide to quit.

Jimmy will join Lester.

The Manager will realize that Jimmy wants out and decide to imprison him too, as less employees could undoubtedly contribute to the declining quality of the store, hyper-competent player character notwithstanding.

• Alternatively, the player character's competence will convince the Manager that Jimmy has outlived his usefulness and imprison/murder him for daring to defect from the store.

New co-workers will be added in an update.

A new shift will see a new recruit being added to the team. They'll either be a simple background character or possibly a new "enemy" in that they'll constantly ask you, the more experienced employee, for help. Alternatively, a new recruit could be an unruly teenager that'll try sabotaging your work For the Evulz, providing even more of a challenge in balancing stocking and assisting customers.

A future update will include a genuinely kind customer

They have a rare chance of spawning per game, where they will serve as a one-time helpful NPC and offer the player a brief relief from the other unruly customers.

The baby is the mastermind.

One sketch on the "survival notes" paper is a drawing of the baby with the message "BEWARE THE BABY" sprawled next to it. The baby could be behind the bizarre happenings within the store. Perhaps he's possessing the customers, or the Manager, or was behind the imprisonment/murder of Lester?

The guy in the green shirt is a Serial Killer.

His requests are more often than not deeply disturbing. He'll ask for fake blood (this game is set around Halloween time), knives that are extra sharp, the goriest video game in the store, and murder mystery magazines. He could just be a simple Nightmare Fetishist, but considering the nature of this game, he could be or is on his way to becoming a serial killer.

Final boss - The Manager.

Your character eventually decides the job is no longer worth it and tries to escape like Jimmy did, but the Manager is furious with you for trying to quit, preventing you from leaving, resulting in a horrifying last game of cat and mouse.

The "Consumers" are actual zombies.

The reason for the groaning sounds, parodies of zombies, and even the theme of it being a zombie apocalypse? It's because there's currently a zombie apocalypse going on. This also explains the 5-star Hygiene rating: compared to the rest of the Crapsack World during the start of the zombie of apocalypse, it really is cleaner than the rest. The first guy that came in to work and threw up just got infected by one of the zombies.

There will be a multiplayer mode.

Multiplayer will have two modes: Shift mode, and Co-Worker mode. The titles are pretty self-explanatory, but I'll say what they'll entail anyways.

• Shift mode: The players are working together in one game, with extra time. When the player runs out of time, their shift moves over to the second player, and so on so fourth. Every player can win, every player can lose. Cruel Twist Ending may or may not apply.

• Co-Worker mode: Under the same time limit as single-player mode, all players will work with each other in a single day. The rules from single-player mode apply to this mode as well: If they're reported to the manager or failed to stock enough boxes, they lose.

• Break-In mode: Because the players are a bunch of dumb teens, at night time they decide to break into and steal things from the store. Too bad that they chose this store...

There will be an alternate game mode where you work as a cashier.

The cashiers have it as bad if not worse than the employees working on the aisles, especially considering unlike them, cashiers can't escape from entitled customers.