Tom bought my marker stakes?!

[Kaptain Kat]

I hate to be captain obvious here but maybe someone uses Toms avatar and name. Could happen. Just saying.

The Tom in this picture looks like the real Tom from the game. If it were a friend no matter how they crop the picture it would always show a yellow, blue or green frame around the avatar picture just lie the other friend buying stuff in the example screenshot

Oh ok so about 1 or 2 days. Yes, if its even sitting there for that long then either Tom or Greg is going to buy it regardless of what the item is. It's true you can't hire Tom for expansion & upgrade materials but the reason he bought them was because its been sitting there for a while.

^^ True story, thank you!

What this does is it opens up your box in the shop to put something (else) new up for sale. If Tom or Greg would not eventually buy the items players could get stuck sitting there with items in their shop they can never sell.

[MisterTEZ]

^^ True story,

Agreed! Not long after I started Hay Day and was able to collect Lems I had 3 deeds for sale in my RSS, because I had only a couple of neighbors at the time the deeds were in my shop for over 24 hours and Greg came and bought them.

[Tiggerr129]

But he isn't supposed to buy expansion material!! That's the big difference...

That used to be the theory some time ago, even the mods thought so, but now we know that Tom has two functions and they are unrelated.

The first of course is to be a lazy errand boy with a good union!

The second is as Greg's helper. Greg will buy anything left in the stands for a while and some developer must have thought he needed an assistant so Tom got drafted. Actually I suspect it has to do with the coding required to make sure Greg doesn't buy more than one thing. If the criteria was just that he bought what still remained after x number of hours, he could buy out a whole shop and get reported for raiding. ;-) Just kidding. Someone must have thought we needed just a little more help and wrote Greg's coding into Tom. I have just had both Tom and Greg buy something because I wasn't playing for a couple days and wasn't there to put an ad on those sweaters.

Tom doesn't get what he fetches for us from other haydayer's RSS stalls. He gets it from the clashers down river. :-)

[ruthlesspenguin]

From the information provided in these posts, I think we can reach a number of tentative conclusions about how things work in the hayday universe:

1. When we request items from Tom he is sourcing them from a central supply, not other peoples stores. When we ask for items, he is not searching the globe looking for the best deal, but simply returning to the central supply to get the current deals. He then goes back to central supply to get the items.
2. Tom is even lazier than we thought! When I thought he was looking at millions of rss every time he told me about items, I could kind of accept that even though it only took him a minute, it was so exhausting that he needed to sleep for two hours. But now that we know he is just returning to central supply...
3. Supercell should give Tom a mobile phone so he can call central supply to find out the current deals. In fact, given SC's business, they should be ashamed that Tom isn't equipped with a smart phone that has an app that automatically updates with current prices!
4. Tom also buys from our road side stores and takes the goods back with him to central supply when he goes to pick up our stuff.
5. The barn and silo at central supply must be massive and need to be continually expanded as more players join. It therefore follows that Tom will be buying and not selling bems, since they are needed to expand the central supply buildings.
6. Explaining why Tom needs lems is more complicated. The best of my current theories is that when the barns and silos get really big, they take up more space, so central supply needs to be constantly expanded to make room. Or maybe there is a max storage for each barn/silo of something like 1million and after that point they need to build more.
7. Tom can't be getting all these expansion materials from our roadside stores. There just aren't enough reports of Tom buying expansion materials. Perhaps he is also able to search red boxes on our farm without us knowing?

Anyway, that's my best theory based on the current evidence. Let me know if you can see any flaws or improve on it.