The Tadog Corporation, the parent company of both the Tadog Mercantile and the Tadog Daily Paper, has recently approved a grant to the Tadog Mercantile. This was confirmed according to a public tax report sent out by the Tadog Corporation accountant, Ben Dover. Shortly after, design and construction documents were sent to the Aquaspawn Commissioner for approval, confirming that a new remodel project on the Tadog Mercantile was planned. As to the writing of this article, the Remodel is Planned to start sometime this week.

“A remodel and redesign of the Tadog Mercantile has been long overdue.” Explained Mike Hock, an economic analyst for the Tadog Daily Piper. “Shop profits and sales have been in a slow decline over the past months as the economic landscape of the server changes.”

When the server economy was first created, it was extremely small compared to what it is now today. At the same time, shops used to operate in a very different manor. In the creation of shops, shops consisted of a chest with a sign, and that was it. To buy and sell, you would right or left click on the sign to buy or sell items within the chest for virtual money. Even though not many shops existed at the time and most shops have switched to shopkeepers since then, you can still find some of these shops today. One is located directley across the West Path from the Tadog Mercantile, as seen in this picture. As you can see in the picture, the chest shops are very compact in size and readability. When the Tadog Mercantile was built, such a large structure for a shop was not needed to accommodate all that Tadog planned to sell. Also at the time, the server economy was very slow. The average size of a sale made in the shop is nearly 10X less than today. At the time, most people could only afford to sell and produce 32 pieces of an item at a time, and often less. It is a far cry from the average 5-10 stacks of an item sold at one time. Overtime however, demand and quantaty supplied increased, and avaliable land in the downtown area decreased, with Tadog being boxed in geographically by mountians and the lake, and as well as claims surrounding the shop.

For many years, according to analyses done by Mike Hock, the Tadog Mercantile had long outgrown the small structure, however the small confines of the building were preventing the shop from reaching its full potential. While the Tadog Mercantile runs a second location in the Octamall, and owns the Raid Shop, this expansion and eventual restructuring of the shop is planned to lead the Tadog Mercantile back to glory.

However, expanding the shop will not be easy, as the shop itself does not have the available land to get bigger. According to Mr. Hock, there were many talks of constructing a third floor of the Tadog Mercantile. “The board had discussed constructing a third floor,” Hock explained, “but some members feared the building would look ugly, as well as the fact that the Tadog Mercantile would become to be, or viewed as a tower, as towers have connotations to large corporations, which is something we didn’t want to do.”

However, most concerning to the board was the historical aspect of the building. The structure, built on April 27th, 2020, is one of the oldest structures that exists in the downtown area, and was one of the first few buildings built along the shores of spawn lake. Aside from interior lighting and wall arrangements, the superstructure and design has remained unchanged since its construction. “With the structure being so old, the board was worried about retaliation from the public, as well as within our own organization for changing such a historical structure in a historical location.” Explained Mr. Hock. Hock said after these concerns were confronted, expansion was not revisited again for many months until now.

According to pre-construction documents submitted by Mike Hock and the design team to the Downtown permit department, the expansion is planned to take place underground. The basement is to be expanded to accommodate more shopkeepers, and will be redesigned to follow modern code requirements and Tadog Corporation standards. The storage room for the shop is planned to be completely gutted and remodeled as well, however those documents were not available when requested by the Piper’s correspondent Maya Achinbals. The project was awarded to the Tadog Construction Company, which is also owned by the Tadog Corporation.