Independent fan guide. Details reflect the launch patch (v1.0.3) and cite official sources; if the game updates, in-game text always wins.
01How the shop app works
The shop is an app on your work computer, which means buying things is a keyboard problem before it is a money problem. Open the catalog, browse the rows, and bash your way to a purchase the same way you enter a spreadsheet value. The moment you buy, the listing does not disappear: it stays in the app marked SOLD, so the catalog doubles as a running receipt of everything you own. That sounds trivial and is not. Several achievements ask you to own specific things, and the SOLD tags are the fastest way to audit what you are missing without crawling the desk counting objects.
Delivery is refreshingly physical. Whatever you buy shows up on or around the desk, and the game does not tidy up after itself, so a shopping spree has a real spatial cost. Players who bought the trampoline, the printer and a small army of interns in a single afternoon describe the workspace the way people describe a garage after a move. The menu's Reset Objects option returns toppled items to safe positions, with one standing exception: never press it while the printer is mid-job, because the print button can vanish with the work half-done.
One quirk deserves a warning before you spend a cent. Prices in this shop are not all equally documented. A handful appeared in official pre-release screenshots and can be treated as fact; the rest come from launch playthroughs and community guides, and a few wiki farms have been inventing numbers for this game since day one. The next section separates the two tiers clearly, because the difference matters when you are planning a whole week on task pay.
02The price list: verified and reported
Two tiers of confidence here. The verified prices come from official material and match what players see in game. The reported prices come from launch playthroughs and community guides, and they are labeled as such everywhere on this site. Where a number carries a tilde, the approximation is deliberate: the source footage was blurry, a transcript was garbled, or two players saw slightly different figures on different days.
The intern line needs its own footnote. Your first intern costs a verified 400 dollars, the price climbs by roughly 100 with each hire, and hiring stops at a maximum of one hundred interns. That escalation is why our intern guide treats hiring as a budgeting decision rather than a spree, and why the full intern program is best measured in four figures rather than one.
| Item | Price | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smartphone Charger | $50 | Verified | Cheapest confirmed item; keeps the phone alive |
| Stabilized Mouse | $100 | Verified | Fixes the intentionally awful starter mouse |
| Slim Keyboard | $250 | Verified | One-way upgrade; see the keyboard guide first |
| Intern | $400 | Verified | Rises about $100 per hire, up to 100 interns |
| L-Shaped Desk | $1,000 | Verified | The critical-path purchase; has its own guide |
| Reading Nook | $10 | Reported | Upgradable from Comfy to Cozy; raises the cap |
| Monitor Extension | ~$600 | Reported | Room to watch several stock tickers at once |
| Printer | ~$1,250 | Reported | Ships with pens; reachable via the trampoline |
| Squat Machine | ~$1,800 | Reported | Top-tier gear for the Muscle Mass tree |
| Pile of Dirt (land) | $2,000 | Reported | Delivered after three in-game days |
| Webcam | $3,000 | Reported | Buy only when Steve asks; see the warning below |
| Soundboard | ~$5,000 | Reported | Same rule: wait for the call |
| Coffee Machine | ~$8,000 | Reported | Coffee speeds the market tick, with the perk |
| Kevin | $10,000 | Reported | Priciest item; does tricks; earned one player an S |
03What unverified prices mean
Every number on this site carries a label, and the labels mean something specific. Verified means the figure appeared in official material and lines up with in-game reports. Reported means it comes from playthroughs, community guides or forum threads, consistent enough to plan around but not blessed by an official price list. Unverified means nobody reliable has published a figure at all, and the trampoline is the famous case: effectively mandatory, priced nowhere authoritative.
Checking a price yourself takes ten seconds, which is why this guide does not panic about approximations. Open the shop app, find the item, read the tag. If some other site quotes confident exact figures for everything, printer price tiers, an exact soundboard cost, an invented premium currency, check whether it cites anything, because fabricated specifics for this game are a known content-farm genre. The Financial Insight tree even contains a perk named Informed buyer, which tells you the developers expected shopping to be a system worth studying.
Some prices wobble between reports for honest reasons. The soundboard is the clearest case: community guides carry a figure around five thousand dollars, and one garbled line in a launch transcript hints at more. We print the range and the caveat rather than a fake certainty. A tilde is a promise, not a shrug.
04Do not buy the webcam or soundboard early
Here is the most important paragraph in this guide. Buying the webcam or the soundboard before Steve's phone call asks for them can soft-lock your progression. The objective system expects those purchases in story order, and an early buy has broken the chain for launch-week players: the game can end up waiting for a purchase you already made, and the objective refuses to complete. The developer has acknowledged the bug and is working on a fix, but as of the current patch the rule stands.
So obey the phone. After the contract paperwork, Steve calls to tell you to prepare for the interview: buy the trampoline, the webcam at 3,000 dollars, the soundboard and a framed photo. That call is your green light for all of it, in whatever order you like. Before the call, the webcam and soundboard do not exist as far as your objectives are concerned. Admire them in the catalog. Close the app. Go read a book at the nook.
If the damage is already done, your options are limited but real. The game keeps three save slots, and the community's standard fix is loading an earlier slot from before the premature purchase. Manual-versus-auto save specifics are undocumented, so nobody can promise you a clean snapshot exists. That is exactly why the prevention paragraph opens this section instead of closing it.
05A buy order that works
Task pay starts small and grows with your Financial Insight level, and the five-spreadsheets-in-24-hours bonus of 200 dollars rewards steady days, so attack the shop in phases. The early phase buys income and information rather than comfort. The Reading Nook costs a reported ten dollars and houses the entire Financial Insight perk tree. The smartphone charger at a verified 50 keeps the reward app's battery alive. The stabilized mouse at a verified 100 removes the worst input device in the game. That is a strong first stretch of spending, and none of it is wasted.
Mid-game is really one purchase wearing a crown. Save for the 1,000-dollar L-shaped desk, because nothing else on the list rearranges the game the way it does: a new workspace layout, three tradeable stocks instead of one, and the contract chain that leads to the promotion interview. Pick up the trampoline along the way; the price is unverified, the function is not, since it is the practical route to the printer and the high shelf. The late phase is interview equipment and self-improvement gear, bought exactly when the story says.
The rarely-and-never column is short and opinionated. The keyboard line tops out at a touch keyboard the community regards as a genuine downgrade, accidental double-presses and all, with no way back down the ladder. Our advice matches the forum consensus: stay on the chunky clacky keys as long as you can stand them, and spend the difference on interns.
| Phase | Buy | Why it earns its price |
|---|---|---|
| Early | Reading Nook, Smartphone Charger, Stabilized Mouse, Worm Weights | Income, perks and a usable mouse for under $200 |
| Early-mid | Trampoline (price unverified) | Access to the printer and the high shelf |
| Mid | L-Shaped Desk, $1,000 | Unlocks three stocks and the promotion chain |
| Late | Monitor Extension, Printer, Squat Machine | Trading visibility, paperwork, deeper gym tiers |
| On the call | Webcam, Soundboard, Framed Photo | Interview kit; the timing is mandatory |
| Whenever rich | Land, Coffee Machine, Kevin, more interns | Joy, buffs and one S-rank story |
| Rarely or never | Keyboard upgrades past the starter | Touch keyboard widely reported as worse, no switching back |
06Dress to Impress: the hat economy
Buried in the Financial Insight perk tree is the closest thing this game has to a shopping discount: Dress to Impress, which pays you ten percent more income while you are wearing a hat. Not a specific hat. Any hat. The perk turns the hat rack into office infrastructure, and the reward pipeline is the reason you will own several hats without ever buying one from this catalog.
The hats themselves arrive through WormTok, the smartphone app where every achievement and challenge has a claimable reward. The Beverage Hat doubles as hands-free hydration and its own achievement. The Tie and the Neck Bow are pure human cosplay. The Bank-Balance Hat is the game bragging about your account at a milestone. None of them cost money, which makes the ten percent perk effectively free income once you have unlocked it.
Practically, the routine is simple: unlock the perk, claim a hat, wear it every working hour. Players describe forgetting the hat on a big trading day the way people describe leaving a wallet at home. A hat does nothing for you in a drawer, and there is no downside to wearing it through spreadsheets, gym sessions or your daily communion with the pile of dirt. It is the best-dressed ten percent in finance.
07The expensive aisle: dirt, coffee and Kevin
The top of the catalog is where the game stops pretending this is a budgeting exercise. Land, listed as a pile of dirt, runs a reported 2,000 dollars and takes three in-game days to arrive, which makes it the only purchase with a shipping wait long enough to plan a week around. What do you get for the money? Dirt. A little piece of home. Communing with it counts, earning God I Love Dirt for 20.3% of players, and no worm on record has regretted the purchase.
Coffee, at a reported 8,000 dollars for the machine, is priced like a joke and plays like an economy tool. With the right Financial Insight perk, coffee makes the stock market tick faster, turning caffeine into trading hours. It also unlocks the intern strategy covered elsewhere on this site: dousing an intern in coffee or water buffs them permanently, developer-confirmed. Run a hundred-intern floor and the machine stops being a luxury and becomes infrastructure.
Then there is Kevin, at a reported 10,000 dollars the most expensive item in the shop. The listing says he does tricks, and community reports say he absorbs an indecent amount of abuse. Kevin is not required for anything except joy, with one exception: a player held him up to the interview webcam, the scan registered, and the grading system handed out an S. The top of the interview ladder, partially credited to a ten-thousand-dollar coworker. Finance is a strange industry.
08The achievements hiding in the shop
Three achievements live directly inside this catalog. Locked In, at 33.9%, arrives when you buy the webcam, the soundboard and the framed photo, the full interview kit, which is why a third of all players own it and why the timing bug at the top of this guide matters so much. Expensive Taste, at 6.0%, demands every item in the shop, Kevin very much included. Give Me Attention, at 7.2%, asks you to push every possible item onto the ground, which sounds free and is not: the developer has confirmed you need to buy everything first.
Give Me Attention has fine print worth reading before you start shoving. Papers, printed money and interns do not count toward it, so you can push interns around all day for zero progress. The phone, the radio, cups and the high-shelf items do count. Players also report the achievement sometimes pops on the next launch rather than the moment the last object lands, so do not panic-reset a bare desk. Treat a full catalog, a cleared floor and a restart as one checklist.
Chase them in buy order and they mostly chase themselves. Locked In comes with the story. Expensive Taste comes last by definition, because Kevin. Give Me Attention sits between the two, best attempted the same week you complete the catalog, when every pushable object on the desk is owned and present. The achievement roadmap page sequences all three against the rest of the list.
09Shop habits worth keeping
A closing handful of habits from launch week. Buy cheap information gear before expensive comfort gear; a ten-dollar nook returns more than any piece of furniture ever could. Keep a running total before big purchases, because the shop does not warn you about the intern price escalation, and a fifth intern is not priced like the first. Leave the desk walkable: every purchase is a physical object, and a workspace crammed with trinkets makes the physics engine your enemy at two in the morning.
Two calendar notes and one phone note. The land takes three days to deliver, so order it before you need a dirt moment, not after. The coffee machine's payoff scales with how much trading and intern-dousing you actually do, which makes it a late buy for most players. And the phone note is this entire guide in one sentence: Steve's call opens the interview-equipment window, and until it rings, the webcam and soundboard rows of the catalog are read-only.