I think I made a good choice early on. When I placed the "shopkeepers" in their shops, I gave them some simple, sample dialogue that ran something like this:
"Hello. Want to buy something?"
"Yes."
"No."
I knew full well that by doing this I was gonna add more detailed conversation later on. This gave me a platform for debugging any simple errors that I would experience. I side-effect of this gave me another idea. I could flesh things out further by making separate conversations for the first time the player speaks to the merchant and another for after they have met them, heard their stories, and no longer wanted to read through a massive amount of redundant text.
After all, your co-workers don't normally introduce themselves everytime you talk to them. If they do, perhaps they have a mental illness and that can be overlooked.
