Out of my hands.

Felt myself relaxing yesterday, because I'm done influencing the Christmas sales. What will be, will be. Too late to do any reorders.

Besides, counter-intuitive as it is, I've found it better to make lots of reorders during slow times, and not so much in busy times. Busy times mean lots of new visitors, either infrequent locals or out-of-towners, and everything in the store is new to them. An item that might have been passed by a dozen times by regulars might be just the thing that someone from the valley has been looking everywhere for.

I'm glad we had the storm last week; hopefully everyone is acclimated.

I do wonder what's going to happen next year with everyone's inventory. I suspect that every retailer is cutting back, and the unintended result will be that there will be less selection and higher prices.

Which will come as a shock, since I'm certain the public believes the retailers are desperate.

I know that what happens in my store is that the LESS I sell of a stocked item, the MORE likely I am to stick to full retail price. Since I'm a long-tail store with lots of diverse product, but an inch deep, this is pretty much my pricing strategy.

Bigger stores who deal in large volume, who deal in what I would term commodities, have a pricing structure based on buying in quantity, getting the lowest price, and therefore need to sell in quantity to make it all work.

I think a 'specialty' store wanders into this territory at their own peril.

Meanwhile, I'm sure that everyone thinks the internet will be the answer. But I suspect that shortages of a particular product will appear there, too, because so many of the internet sites are connected to brick and mortar stores and because cut backs are cut backs.

There is an interconnected aspect to all this that everyone is underestimating. And the cascading effects of cutbacks will ripple all through the economy.