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 his sales this weekend, and the busy shopping days to come.Looks as if we might have had too much of a good thing this past weekend. Not only did our regular shipment of new releases from Games Workshop hit the shelves but we also received the new Crystal Games expansion for the My Little Pony TCG, the New Challengers Special Edition set for Yu-Gi-Oh!, the Duel Decks Anthology for Magic The Gathering, the Shadowrun Runner's Took Kit Alphaware and probably one or seven things I have missed. That's a lot of pretty cool stuff to hit the shelves within 24 hours. Probably too much, as we, and other stores with which I have spoken, have sold fewer of the assorted items than expected. It could be that, as research has shown, when faced with too many choices, the human brain finds itself unable to make a decision and, not able to make a decision, chooses not to purchase anything at all.
Conversely it could just be that it is the holiday shopping season and our customers have chosen to allocate scarce dollars to gift buying for other people instead of dropping $100 on a Duel Decks Anthology or $125 on a Shield of Baal Deathstorm Warhammer 40,000 set, instead hoping that friends, parents or significant others choose to buy gaming presents instead.
If they choose to buy gaming presents, they have the busiest shopping days of the year still to come. Three of the ten busiest shopping days of the year have already passed us leaving seven to go. The busiest shopping day of the year, according to consumer traffic monitoring firm ShopperTrak, is still Black Friday, and has been so for the past six years. The three Saturdays before Christmas are the next busiest shopping days of the year, then the Wednesday after Christmas, when everyone goes out to return the gifts they got that did not work out or to use the gift cards they received. The two Sundays and the Friday before Christmas also rank in the top 10 shopping days of the year. After December 26th, shopping levels sink back towards normal until we hit next Thanksgiving weekend.
So, if you are a customer wanting to know when to avoid the crowds, or a store owner needing to plan staffing (hopefully you have already done that), here, in order are the busiest shopping days of 2014:
- Black Friday (day after Thanksgiving)
- December 20th (the Saturday before Christmas)
- December 13th
- December 6th (the 3rd Saturday before Christmas)
- December 26th (Boxing Day in Britain)
- December 21st (the Sunday before Christmas)
- November 28th (Small Business Saturday)
- December 19th (the Friday before Christmas)
- December 14th (two Sundays before Christmas)
- December 11th (two Fridays before Christmas)
Incidentally, if you plan on ordering anything, best to get those orders in soon. The average order last year took about nine days to arrive, according to Direct Marking Magazine, meaning any orders put in after about the 15th of December have a better than even chance of not arriving by Christmas (unless, of course, you wish to spend more for speedy delivery). If you look for items much after that date, your Friendly Local Game Store will be your best bet for making sure you get that particular present.
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.