Nation of shopkeepers

[Martin Keegan <martin#cam,sri.com>]

There've been many interesting attempts to provide muds with fully
functioning (even 'player-run' ;) ) economies. It's quite easy to
implement player-owned shops. Slightly harder is coding player-run shops.

Note that I said "coding"; actually implementing player-run shops would
appear to me to be extremely difficult - because giving players incentives
to sit around behind a counter all day rather than go out and adventure
would appear to be impossible. This same problem, of no-one being
interested in the more menial jobs in a mud economy, would seem to stymie
any decent attempt at a player-run economy, which is a pity.

Does anyone have a solution to this?

Mk

P.S. An exception might be running a pub :)