Open GO Recruit on your phone. The new hire waits outside the store until you give them a duty.

How many staff can I hire?

The roster lists nine. The wiki notes the Top Recruiter achievement needs eight hired at once.

Do staff cost anything when idle?

Yes. While employed, regardless of duties, a worker picks up a daily salary, one of the three bills.

TCG Card Shop Simulator Staff and Hiring Guide

Staff are the cheapest way out of a bottlenecked shop and the easiest way to bleed profit on a slow day. Every figure below comes from the wiki roster table or the wiki’s reverse-engineered Employee Statistics table.

The roster, end to end

Hiring happens in GO Recruit on the phone. Levels are shop levels, and shop XP is earned per sale on the item sold rather than at a flat rate, so those gates arrive when your volume does. Fees and salaries are the wiki roster’s own figures; how many salary days a fee takes back is arithmetic, so the payback calculator at the end of this page does it for you.

Hire	Level	Restock	Checkout	Hiring fee	Salary
Zackery Cole	10	Normal	Slow	$500	$50
Terence Fay	15	Slow	Normal	$1,000	$150
Dennis Brandon	20	Fast	Normal	$2,000	$300
Clark Cash	25	Slow	Very Fast	$2,400	$400
Angus Mick	30	Very Fast	Slow	$3,000	$500
Benji Otto	35	Fast	Fast	$5,000	$500
Alexander Cole	38	Fast	Fast	$8,000	$400
Lauren Posie	40	Fast	Fast	$7,500	$500
Axel Charleton	45	Very Fast	Very Fast	$10,000	$700

Those speed words are coarse. The statistics table gives the seconds per action behind them, lower being faster, plus walk speed and whether a worker walks out when the clock hits 9 PM.

Hire	Scan item (s)	Restock (s)	Walk speed	Leaves at 9 PM sharp
Zackery Cole	3.7905	2.45	0.9	TRUE
Terence Fay	3.059	2.55	1.05	FALSE
Dennis Brandon	2.5935	1.25	1.1	FALSE
Clark Cash	1.197	2.5	1.0	TRUE
Angus Mick	3.3915	0.4	1.05	FALSE
Benji Otto	1.729	1.2	1.3	TRUE
Alexander Cole	1.89525	1.225	1.5	FALSE
Lauren Posie	1.862	1	1.15	FALSE
Axel Charleton	1.3167	0.5	1.5	FALSE

Two formulas from that page are worth memorizing. Scan time equals change back time multiplied by 1.33, and price setting takes exactly as long as scanning, which is why the slowest workers are the best people to park on repricing.

What a worker actually does all day

Hired staff wait outside the store until needed, and stockers rest outside when idle. Click a worker to reassign their duty or terminate them. Firing carries risk: the 1.0 changelist fixes a bug where a “worker skill level lost if fired and then save game”.

Two traps cost more than any salary:

The 9 PM save bug. The wiki warns that if you save after the shop closes at 9 PM, your save file will not retain the duties you set, so save before closing.
Instant leave. A TRUE worker drops what they are holding at 9:00 PM. Clark Cash will walk out mid-shift and leave a queue behind; Lauren Posie stays until the last customer is out. The Fandom overview gives the same example with the same conclusion.

When a hire pays for itself

Salary is one of three bills in the Pay Bills app, alongside rent (base $50 before expansions) and electricity ($4 per checkout counter plus a per minute light rate). A hired worker bills you every day whether the shop was busy or not, so the payback test is not whether you can afford $400 a day, it is whether the day after hiring beat the day before.

The Daily Report gives you the lines to compare: Employ, which totals salary, and Dissatisfied in the customer block. If Employ rises and Dissatisfied does not move, the hire is not earning. Queue logic explains why: a customer checks for a free manned register, then any NPC register with nobody in line, then the shortest queue, and the concurrent customer count is clamped between 3 and 28. An extra cashier is close to worthless while your cap is small.

Cheap is not quick: Zackery Cole has the lowest fee on the roster and the slowest scan on the sheet at 3.7905 seconds per item, which is exactly why the wiki suggests parking him on price adjustments rather than the register.

Order of operations

Community consensus on that page is to hold out for Clark Cash at level 25 and Angus Mick at level 30, the best at checkout and restock respectively, and to use Terence Fay at level 15 as a stopgap cashier while you restock yourself. The alternative is Zackery Cole at level 10 for repricing and box duty, then straight to Clark Cash.

Three achievements sit on this system: Helping Hand for hiring 1 worker, Tight-Knit Team for 4 and Top Recruiter for 8, and the wiki notes you can fire surplus staff once it is signed. Full set on the achievement list, then run your own numbers through the worker payback calculator.

Shelf placement changes what a stocker is worth, so read the layout ideas guide before you commit to a warehouse wall, and see the beginner guide for the level loop that gates these hires.

Sources

Source note: Every mechanic and figure in this guide traces to a saved copy of an official TCG Card Shop Simulator store page, developer news post, or community wiki record captured before publication. Anything the sources do not settle is marked rather than estimated. Corrections to [email protected].