Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne reports from the front lines of the kick-off of the holiday shopping season.

Another Small Business Saturday (and Local Comic Shop Day but I will leave it to the more comic book-oriented columnists to discuss it) comes and goes.  Once again, as I have commented in the past, the problem with scheduling Small Business Saturday on the Saturday after Thanksgiving is that it is hard to tell how much of the sale jump comes from SBS and how much comes from holiday sales.  Most of the sales reports I have heard from stores have indicated pretty strong sales, with some stores running pretty deep advertised discounts on products and lines while others relied solely on the stronger traffic flow generated by holiday shoppers.

I did note much less promotion by American Express regarding signing up for Small Business Saturday promotions this year, though more social media advertising and even a mention by President Obama.  We only received one email from the company, compared to the two dozen plus we received in past years.  It appears AmEx chose to deliver the actual promo materials through the local Chamber of Commerce as we received our Shop Small banners and bags from them.  No gift cards to give out this year though, nor a $25 credit from AmEx to their customers when they used AmEx in participating stores.  Rather, indicating the lack of use by our customers of AmEx cards, in the years that AmEx offered the credit and we promoted it, we never had a single customer ask to use an AmEx card on Small Business Saturday and this year, we had no one even ask about it.  Unfortunately for them, AmEx is a tiny segment of most game store sales and many stores have quit taking the card altogether.  We keep taking AmEx simply because I dislike telling a customer "No" for whatever reason, especially when it comes to taking their money.  Dropping the card would mean we have to ask them for another form of payment and, while most customers are fine with that, I find it far easier to just say "Why yes, we do take American Express."

I do want to call attention to three releases that came out just in time for Black Friday and Small Business Saturday.

Fantasy Flight Games released 4 new ships for their Imperial Armada game.  While not as popular as the company’s X-Wing Miniatures game, and significantly more expensive, it is still nice to have hobby-related Star Wars items come in during the run-up to the new movie.  Now if we would just see FFG develop a retailer locater as good as Steve Jackson Games'.

We saw a lot of interest in the Boss Monster 2 Limited Edition which released, complete with a Paper and Pixels expansion pack, from Brotherwise Games.  This version, the same as the original Boss Monster 2 game, comes with foil Boss cards, whereas the standard version does not.  Also, while quantities last, stores receive the Paper and Pixels pack with each copy purchased.  A nice present indeed.


Finally, AEG repeated their Black Box promotion from 2014, a sealed black box containing several AEG games, with no indication as to what they might be, at $49.99 retail.  Unlike last year, when we had several customers come to the store specifically to get a Black Box, this year, it was more "Oh, what's this?  Cool, I like surprises, go ahead and ring one up for me."  Well done, Brotherwise, AEG and FFG, well done!

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.