Can anyone give me some tips on how to make unconventional businesses like clubs and arcades work?

First of All you need a Ticket Machine, so that you can charge by the hour. Second make sure that you have a number of Fun Items for the Sims to enjoy.

For an Arcade I would have several Pin Ball Machines, Several stand alone Video Games, a couple of TVs with Video Machines, and you might want to place the Gamer Reward Pinball Machine. I would also have a Coffee Bar, or a Drinks Bar and make food available with the Buffet Table, or one of the BV Food Stands, or have a Refrigerator & Stove.

For a Club I would have at least two Pool Tables, one DJ with an Employee to operate it, a Drinks Bar, and one or two of the Spinning Exercise things, a Karaoke Machine and make food available with the Buffet Table, or one of the BV Food Stands, or have a Refrigerator & Stove.

I use the hacked stove that provides a NPC cook with a Refrigerator at my Club. I have both an Arcade Place {owned by Malcolm Landgraab} and a Club {one of them owned by Maclcolm and a couple of others as well} I especially like Clubs.

I have fun stuff and a tiket machine.

Club Dante they cluster around the ticket machine and don't bu even on Cheap, which barely covers expenses. I'll update with a DJ and pool tables

As for the Arcade, none of them touched the fun stuff, they all swarmed the Raman counter.

Well, sims are very simple creatures. They don't need a lot to keep them entertained for hours. Running a business with a ticket machine is the easiest type to run and can be very low maintenance; to make money all you need is a sim with a silver sales badge or higher.

The "problem" with a premade biz like Club Dante is that it's too big and the workers there aren't skilled (I don't think anyone there has a sales badge). Furnishing a large club like that is expensive so if you're building a ticket biz from scratch keep that in mind and start small, and add on as you go. As for the items to use in your biz, it doesn't really matter too much--that mainly depends on your business's aesthetic--but use items that promote fun and social.

You can have a very successful biz with just a poker table, or a bubble blower, or a hot tub, or even just a dart board. Pool tables can be good, but I find sims are often interrupted and never finish a game. Chess or poker is better, imo. When I run a nightclub, though, I usually make sure there's either a hot tub or a bubble blower--sims will use it happily for hours, giving away all their money. When I played Club Dante, I kept this in mind and sold a bunch of useless stuff and then reconfigured the place to have a hot tub room. That alone is enough to keep sims entertained. As for bars and the dj booth, well, you can keep them for aesthetics, or if you want your playables to be able to visit the lot later, but honestly, they're money wasters. Send the employees who work at those stations home for the day and use the punch barrel and a stereo instead--especially when you are just starting out and you have little money to spare. They work just as well and your sim can clean up in between selling tickets. Also sims will get hungry from time to time so put in some vending machines or a barbeque or something.

And now for the money making part. To make money with a ticket biz, again, you just need someone to sell tickets--perferably a gold badge, but silver will do. Sell tickets on the cheapest setting until your sim gets a silver badge. That may mean you need to sell things at ridiculously cheap, or that you just play a sales business before coming back to run the club. You can also hire a sim with a sales badge, but you want whomever is doing the sales to be controllable, so that you can choose the best sales interaction, so the sim you hire should also have enough skills to become a manager. Once you have a silver badge and can start using Hard Sell, you can start charging whatever you want and getting sims to pay hundreds of dollars for a ticket by setting a custom price. Dazzle makes it even easier to sell, but there's an energy drop when using it, so use it judiciously. Once you can use Dazzle, you shouldn't have any problem making money because you can easily charge whatever you want for a ticket.

But if you find that many sims are grumpy when you try to sell them a ticket, and that they refuse your sims' sales, try putting some Snapdragons near the ticket machine to boost their mood. That will make it easier to sell to them. Snapdragons placed around the club will also keep everyone's motives high so that they stay and hang out longer. Also, if you find that you only have 1 or 2 sims coming to the club, even though you have a high rank, you may need to use a cheat or a mod to increase the number of lot visitors. The more sims on the lot buying a ticket, the more money you make.

In my Club Dante, the customers usually watched TV and paid little attention to anything else until I put pool tables in. It does sound as if something is interfering with normal operation at your businesses though.

Do you have any business-related mods that might be interfering with normal function? Do any conflicts show up in the Hack Conflict Detector (HCDU)?
https://simfileshare.net/folder/15697/

If you mean that food stall run by an NPC with bar stools, then yes, you can't use that. That is coded way too high.

Food options:
exem payable plate
simwardrobe pay buffet
a game buffet table
uni cafeteria

Fire all staff. You can hire them when you really need them.

Get Malcolm to do basic sell. If the sim accepts that do two more.
If the sim rejects the first one do not try them again. Doing more will only get you more shade.

I like Club Dante, I use a DJ Booth there for sure and I think I have Pool Tables, I put Pool Tables in most every Club, so Pool Tables are a good idea for sure. I have someone at the Bar there, and someone on the DJ Booth...family members can do these jobs. If you are not getting Sims to buy a Ticket then you should have someone assigned to Sell the Tickets...try the Owner or one of the Family Members.

If you have Family have the owner take their family to the Club and have the Family Members help do the jobs. If your owner does not have any Family I suggest getting married and or moving a sim or two into the house.

You can also go to InSimenator.org and get some mods by Squinge for OFB, I have more than a few of Squinge's OFB mods. Squinge's Mods

For the Arcade I would take out the Ramen Counter then and replace it with the BarBQ or a Buffet Table, don't hire anyone and just have the owner man a coffee bar. Family members can help here too. Note I added a Second Floor and even more Arcade Stuff.

As for a bubble blower, I didn't add one to Club Dante, but I did add one to anther club of mine, so maybe include one for Club Dante

Note I use these mods from http://www.Simlogical.com: EndlessBuffetPatch, ijStoveNPCalwaysPatch, PayBuffet.package, so I place a Food Buffet that charges Money and does not have to be restocked or I use the Hacked Stove with the NPC that spawns anywhere.

Generally Set your Ticket Prices really Low until you get some Stars and you get your rating of the business up a bit, once you get the business rating higher the number of visiting Sims will go up. Also you could use a mod, SW-Customer-Limit-Adjuster from SimWardrobe to modify the number of customers visiting.

Some other SimWardrob OFB Mods that I have:
SW-Frozen-Customer-Fix
SW-HelpShoppersFirstFullSalesOptions
SW-Improved-Perk-Up-Interaction
SW-Increased-Reporter-Spawnage
SW-MoodCheckForSalesInteractions
SW-Pay-Owner-To-Play
SW-OFB_Employee_Musician_Controller
SW-OFB-Wage-Adjuster

SimWardrobe's Mods

What about a skating rink? How would you get good money for that

I have done Roller Skating Rinks and Ice Skating Rinks, in each case I modified the Roller Skating Rink that is included Downtown. In the case of the Ice Skating one I replaced the Roller Skating Rink with the Ice Skating one, otherwise I run them the same way.

Ticket Machine, SimWardrobe mods: SW-Customer-Limit-Adjuster, SW-OFB-Wage-Adjuster, one employee on Drink Bar or owner when starting out, Food Buffet {that charges money & no-restocking with mods from Simlogical}.

I like to add tents and an office and sometimes other things, so I added a second story, also I added showers. I would need to check to see what else I did specifically.

Here is a very good way to open a money making and popular arcade:
In a sim's personal aspirations panel there is a 'coconut pinball machine' that you can get for 10,000 aspiration points.
Get enough points to get 2 or 3 of them, then put then in the pixel's personal inventory.
Buy a small lot (built or empty), and put them in there. Set up the lot to have a ticket machine and Inge's auto-teleporter, then open it with her timed open sign.
I always use a flamingo 'needs' hack to keep everyone happy.(BO's 'need freak' works just as well)
You'll have the most popular arcade business in town before too long, and lots of money.
The pixels are addicted to the machine.

@FranH Do you mean this https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Career...Coconut_Pinball It's a career reward. They either need to cheat it, have it as an extractable buyable object or earn it in the Gamer career.

Made some progress with Club Dante. Stuck Mr Useless Employee with Sales along side Malome, Who I'd managed to get to Gold at his other propert, and just let him auto sell, occasionally stepping in just to get enough to pay the bills. All after swapping the dining tables for pool and poker tables. Stove went bye bye in favor of vending and a byffet. Taking away the dance floor until I did the less dancing mod I have in back out. Got the club to Rank

Havent tackled the Arcade or Inter@tive yet.

I've got my businesses doing very well now, but I am having some trouble at the clubs.

I have a manager material sim and a cheep warm body working at the club. As the manager l sim has a gold sales I'd like to assign her toman the tickets and let the warm body tidy up. Nope, won't let me manager countermands my Assign and puts the wam body on sales and takes Tidy Up for herself. She's driving me nuts!

Umm sorry but I don't understand half of your post 'warm body'? 'material'? are you using Google translate?

I take it the game is forcing the manager to tidy up and you want them on sales.

I never use managers because it always seemed broken, I run the shops with my own sims who I am controlling and have them assign who they want where. Perhaps there are mods to make the whole manger thing work better but honestly if not I would toss the idea of a manager.

A lot of people have complained about that over the years. Try Pescado's noreassign and see if that helps.

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/ofb/hacks/

Looked at the MATY RTFM info for this mod and this is what it says: "Attempts by non-selectable sims to reassign workers are ignored. Managers and community lot owners will not be able to randomly reassign workers when not controllable."

Does this mean that attempts to reassign workers by Managers when you are not directly controlling the manager are ignored? I find the wording confusing.

Yes, it does.

I don't know any of the hacks mentioned here, except BO's Need Freak. I have different settings for different venues for NF, and that works nicely enough so, for example, if I keep the sims in a restaurant slightly hungry and slightly uncomfortable, they will all sit down and eat.

@joandsarah77, "warm body" is an expression. It would generally mean you've hired no one special who has any particular skills, just someone alive "warm, as opposed to cold and dead" to be present.

I use Pescado's "Customer Selector" for that. It's a small metal cube (like the one from the robot workbench) which, when clicked on, allows you to set business type and use boolean logic to select what customers you want to require or ban similar to a Visitor Controller. Setting the business type will optimize customer needs. For example, the restaurant setting ensures that customers will arrive hungry. The entertainment setting ensures that they will arrive with low Fun, etc.

I also use Pescado's "Business Runs You" on all my business lots, which provides many useful functions.

Both mods are available here:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/ofb/hacks/

Thank, Noreassign did the trick.