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 talks about how his Christmas sales are shaping up.

Sales have finally started to pick up to what I expect for typical Christmas sales.  Typically, we see significantly higher sales over the Thanksgiving weekend then sales drop back  to more typical levels for the first two weeks of the month before starting to hit "Christmas" levels about the second weekend of the month.  Of course, also about now we see significant out of stocks through distribution.  I won't even bother to  mention the consistent out of stocks of all the individual ships in the X-Wing Miniatures line (Oh wait, I just did) as well as almost all the Reaper line (Whoops), but now Sheriff of Nottingham, Super Scrabble and the D&D Starter Set.  Surprisingly, Settlers of Catan and most of the Days of Wonder games are still in stock as of Sunday.  No idea how long this state of affairs will last, though.  And of course, Cards Against Humanity is still available as long as a store is willing to look at Amazon as a distribution channel, which many stores do.
 
What years in business have taught us is that the holiday months tend to bring bare shelves at distributors and manufacturers and so it falls to the retailer to have to bulk up on stock in November in order to have sufficient to carry us through the Christmas holidays.  Of course, that also means we have to figure out what our customers will want a month before they want it (Not nearly as bad as those poor souls who attend February's Toy Show, putting orders in ten months ahead of time.  My prognoticatory abilities are nowhere good enough to allow me to hit the mark with my orders that far ahead of time.  Putting orders in at the March GAMA Trade show strains my predictive abilities enough, thank you).  This also means we can expect to start seeing the bills for the those November orders coming due in mid-December, though Games Workshop, for one, offers extended dating on one holiday order, meaning we can put it in early November and have the bill not come due until early January, when we should have money from those Christmas sales in the till to cover the bill.
 
With the rise of the online store universe (incidentally, Cyber Monday sales ONLY increased 8% this year over 2013, a significant drop from the 20% increase in 2013 from 2012), the brick and mortar store comes into its own the last week before Christmas and those carefully planned stock ramp ups pay off.  Free Shipping Day (you did know about Free Shipping Day, right?) is December 18th with 952 websites, as of this writing, signed up to offer free shipping on ordered placed that day.  The 18th was picked because it is the last day before Christmas that shipping services will deliver shipments on time.  In fact, based on shipping averages during the holiday in 2013, they likely set the date a wee bit late as the average shipment during the holiday took nine days to arrive.  Meaning, assuming you are reading this on December 15th, the last day to put in an order online and be relatively certain it will arrive on time is tomorrow.  After that, it's off to the FLGS for Cards Against Humanity, Settlers of Catan, Power Grid, D&D 5th Edition books and dice for stocking stuffers.

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.