Because that is the game. Most management games make you short of money; this one makes you short of yourself. The bench, the press and the test rig all need your hands, so starting one means the others wait. The soaking tank is the exception - it runs unattended - which is why loading it first and doing hand work while it hums is the single most useful habit to build. An apprentice, bought later, is the only thing that raises the limit, and it raises it to two, not to infinity.

Because you do not own a press yet. The station is drawn on screen and marked "not owned", and the job card tells you where that fault needs to go, so the shop is honest about what it cannot do. Until you buy one, a bent frame is a job to turn away at the door - the fault badges on the waiting card are there so you can see it coming.

It was still dirty. The press breaks a grimy item more than half the time and a clean one almost never, so the tank is not an optional nicety before pressing - it is the safety step. Nothing in the interface orders you to do it; the risk is simply much lower in one order than the other, and noticing that is the point.

Only once you can see inside them. Pay and hidden faults go together: a cheap lamp is almost always exactly what it looks like, while the most expensive job on the board hides something about half the time. Deliver a repair with a hidden fault still in it and you get nothing and lose standing, so before you own a test rig the reliable money is in small honest work - and after you own one, the rich queue is suddenly yours.

It depends on the street, and that is deliberate. On a harbour row full of drills and radios the queue is thick with bent frames, and the press is the cheapest thing that turns jobs you had to refuse into jobs you can do. On a residential parade of lamps and kettles the common fault is a worn part instead, and there the standing parts order is worth more than the press - you are not short of stations, you are short of spares. The one answer that is wrong everywhere is the apprentice: a second pair of hands is worth almost nothing in a shop that has only two stations to stand at.

No. Each run puts you on a different street, and the street decides the mix of things people bring in - which decides which station is scarce, which decides what you should buy first. The shop name at the top of the screen tells you where you are, and the queue tells you the rest within about a minute. On top of that, from the third day onwards every other day is a named day: a market-day rush where the door will not stop ringing, a supplier failure that starts you with a single spare part and cancels the midday crate, a trade inspector who makes a returned job cost three times as much, or a dealer’s crate - one heavy job worth about four ordinary ones. Which named day is coming is announced at closing time, right beside tomorrow’s rent, so you can spend against it.

No, and the run is built that way. The rent rises every day and eventually outgrows even a fully equipped shop, so every run ends with the bank taking the keys. What you are playing for is how far you get: buying nothing gets you a handful of days, and a well-ordered set of purchases roughly doubles that.