[1.2.298] Cash for items?

But that's assuming they don't pay a certain amount of designers all the time. If they go months on end without introducing anything new, they're still not going to fire designers. I'm pretty sure they'll make profit either way, it;s just a matter of more or less profit.

It doesn't matter if they pay designers all the time or not. If you want to know how much profit the company got in relation to ONE item they made, you factor in the man hours needed to create that item. Whether or not they pay designers all the time is irrelevant.