Is there a reason why some of the restocking shops currently have nothing in them or less than fifteen items? It's not a big deal, but I am curious if this is a common thing with the algorithm. I normally see the shops chock full even when they haven't been restocked in over ten minutes but some are completely empty right now.

they go completely empty once in awhile, I'm not sure how often they do this any more but yeah, occasionally they clear out. so they probably cleared recently and some of the shops haven't restocked as much

That makes sense! I wasn't sure if they cleared for reasons of emptying stock or if it might be a glitch, so I thought I'd ask. Thank you!

I'm pretty sure they only clean once a day at 2am :)

They used to all clear at midnight but this got changed to 2am at the same time that the High Scores script got moved to 2am. This was done to reduce site load when all other stuff resets at midnight like quests or game score sends.

There was a brief period of time when restocking was being fiddled with that they would clear during the day, but this no longer seems to happen. The main thing you might notice is that the depth and breadth of any particular restock is dependent on how many users are online. Most users are unitedstatian, and right now it's pretty late for most unitedstatians so shops will stock less often and with less stuff.