Christmas is coming like a freight train.

It seems like I barely caught a breath after Thanksgiving.  The slow period after that holiday is rapidly coming to a close.

The last ten days before Christmas is when all the action is.  So, perhaps starting this weekend.

I'm not really out of stock of any product that I should have -- I could goose a couple of product lines just to make absolutely sure.  I could make another moderate game order, another moderate book order, another moderate card order.  Depends on how much I want to dump into January, which is the slowest month of the year.

That is, I have to save some of my Christmas "Profits" to pay for late orders -- which means they aren't profits at all.  Then again, if I have to reorder in January, the same thing is true, so it makes sense to try to sell the product in December.

I'm still undecided, and really, if I don't decide in the next day or two, I may as well skip it.

I'm much better stocked than last year -- and if the cold snap hadn't slowed business a little, I probably could have kept an extremely high level of inventory right through the end of the year.  As it is, I probably have more than enough, and all I'd be doing would be making absolutely sure.

The danger of being "absolutely sure"  can be overkill.  My game distributor was out of the Ticket to Ride games, for instance, so I ordered 11 more of them from my comic distributor instead.  Then I realized the games wouldn't get here until the Wednesday before Christmas, so I made a "direct ship" of 9 more.  Unfortunately, for whatever they didn't do the 2-day ship, so I'm getting 20 boxes on the 18th.

That might be a years worth of that game, frankly. 

Meanwhile, I have multiple copies of the game in stock already.

So -- that kind of "Making Absolutely Sure" type ordering almost always results in overordering.

The good thing is that we're financially solvent enough to carry the product through the year without it hurting us.

Stockpiling is such a temptation.  A couple of years ago, DC offered all their graphic novels for an extra 10% off.  I ordered a few hundred dollars worth of the "Evergreens" and wondered how long I would sit on them.  Well, I sat on them for a short period of time, as it turned out.  I could have ordered 10 times what I did and saved money all year.

Then again...there are no guarantees.

I arrived at a "just in time" model of business years ago, mostly because it was what I could  afford, but also because it gave me more flexibility.  Things have gone well enough over the last two years or so that I'm thinking maybe I should be investing more whenever a bargain comes along.

Sort of like floating myself a loan. 

Anyway, time for everyone to get going on the Christmas shopping!   I'm sure I'm not the only store that is facing the short period between Thanksgiving and Christmas to do my re-ordering.