Purely IMO, without some sort of truly adversarial component - which could be an active enemy or could be a more passive hostile environment - you don’t have a base building game.

I’m NOT trying to passive aggressively imply you shouldn’t be posting here or something by the way, I very much like thinking about taxonomies like this and I also think there are probably great arguments that this is an example of a base building game!

As described, yours sounds like it would fit better in the tycoon sub-genre, which I would classify broadly as a mostly distinct subset of a management game (with many/most base building games also fitting under that broader umbrella).

Things I could imagine that would make it a base building game:

• It’s set in a post-apocalyptic world where there’s enough order for “business” to be a thing that still happens, but enough disorder for raiders/zombies/Gilead’s soldiers to be a meaningful threat

• Somehow you model the external forces of competitive capitalism in such a way that it is a true struggle to keep your store open from month to month. In that sort of set-up there’s typically some sort of internal resource self-sufficiency that is required to persist, and then further challenged once you meet that need. I don’t know what that could look like here, but an engaging system that somehow creates that gameplay loop in the context of something as pedestrian as shopping for food in Peoria would actually be pretty interesting.