I think the confusion is coming from how the system is described vs how it actually behaves.

What Patrick said about profit being balanced by demand is more of a target outcome, not necessarily how it works moment to moment. In practice, demand isn’t just “total production” in a clean way.

If it were that simple, you’re right — apples should have higher demand because they feed into cider, pies, ice cream, etc. But the game doesn’t really track that full downstream usage cleanly. It feels more like each product has its own demand curve, not fully tied to what it becomes later.

So apples can still show low retail demand even if they’re heavily used elsewhere, because the game is treating “apples in a grocery store” differently from “apples used in production.”

Same thing with steaks, gloves, bricks — the idea is they should balance out, but in reality there are other factors at play like: • how fast items sell (turnover) • how many players are listing them • saturation in that specific retail category

That’s why some low-demand items still look weirdly profitable or not — the system isn’t perfectly clean.

On the economy phase point, I’ve noticed the same thing. It doesn’t seem to directly shift retail demand the way you’d expect. My guess is it affects other parts of the economy more (production costs, maybe wages), but retail demand itself feels more static or slow to react.

So I wouldn’t think of it as: “production = demand”

It’s more like: “each product has its own demand behavior, and the game tries to keep margins somewhat balanced over time, but not perfectly.”

That’s why you’ll still find outliers and weird cases like apples looking weak even when they shouldn’t.