Question....need some clarification.

If at item's Availability Interval says "1 day", I'm assuming that's 24 hours. Now, does that mean that for that 24 hours, all that fixer is doing is looking for that article? How many concurrent "fixer findings" can a fixer have going on, assuming they can be trying to find multiple items at once?

Thanks!

GB

The question isn't really how many can he do, but how many WILL he do for your players.

The next question is how much he'll charge above the cost of the item for the service of finding it.
I recommend 10% for an easy to acquire item, 20% or more anything with an Availability higher than say 10.
In my mind, the base for this would be R, while an F should bump the price by another 20% on top of that.
On the other hand, if your fixer is looking for something that isn't restricted or illegal in any way, simply difficult to find (ie a famously collectible baseball card), he might not charge so much, perhaps taking as much as 5% off the base search cost (assuming he really, really likes the characters).

So having a fixer search for an item rated at 16F, SWAT Armor for example, lists as 8,000 , so the search should cost the character approximately 3,600 extra, which is 45% of the listed purchase price.

I'd go with a limit of a Fixer being able to look for [skill level] items at one time, myself.

Anyone who's ever used a network of contacts/friends/family knows how much time staying in contact, etc takes up and any halfway decent Fixer will have several Contacts to deal with

Of course, contacts played as faceless drones who do nothing else in their life apart from only doing the Player Character's will probably won't have this problem.

The big delays in doing a fixer's job is in finding out where you can get things, catching up with people, searching through inventories for things that you want, and waiting for people to get back to on things. That last one is arguable the largest delay, and that is why businesses invest in centralised time organisation systems (originally a job for secretaries, but now software does it a lot as well).

Given that it's generally a bad idea to give away so many hints at the interconnections between people when you're commissioning criminal acts, the underworld cannot use these systems, hence the delays. Once you have your hands on an inventory or you have a meeting with someone, adding a few extra items onto the list of things you want takes far less time than setting everything else up.

Fixers always have other clients, as well. If you want to believe that your fixer is yours alone you're living in a fairytale world. A fixer may see an increase in his business when a team asks for 8 big boxes of ammo and a few new weapons, but that likely only contributes a small increase in their workload anyway. Even when they have no business they need to keep in contact with the people they want to buy stuff from because having a recent inventory, shipping plans or just good graces may prove important in finding some piece of gear that they need in the future.

On the other hand, there are risks for the people that he's getting these things off, and money is generally not the best way to smooth these things out. Whilst money clearly changes hands, the sellers are going to want to know that the buyers understand the gravity of the favour they're doing them. It would be totally within their rights to ask for the buyer to do a little something for them, to make their life a little easier in ways that they can't do themselves.

Fixers have significant fixed time costs and very small per-unit time costs. They have smaller fixed costs in terms of favours, and the costs in favours increase more significantly with additional units. Your 'runners should be limited not by the time investment a fixer needs to make (he'll make it, he gets paid well for it after all) but, instead, by the cost in favours their fixer will want them to run for him in order to smooth the business of acquiring the goods they want.

They'll be doing small runlike things por gratis. Maybe one of their contacts wants a dealer or two pushed out of his neighbourhood, or someone to watch an Aztech compound discreetly. Maybe your fixer just wants the people next door to stop playing loud music at 3 AM. Clearly as the number and availability of the items goes up it's going to take a larger number of more serious favours to get him to agree.