What Next?

Metal Earth has been one of this season's bright spots. I've carried those models for at least three years now, and they do a little better each Christmas. Oddly, though, they never sell at all outside of November and December -- presumably it's something that everyone thinks somebody else will like, yet nobody buys for themselves. If that's true, is there any way it could become a year-round line?

It's an ideal product in many ways. Being a uniform small size and weighing next to nothing, they're cheap to ship and easy to store. There are no batteries to go bad or trigger shipping restrictions, no moving parts to break, and they aren't fragile. The range of subjects is wide enough to appeal to anybody who likes models. I can advertise a lot of individual items with one small group of keywords, and the bidding for those words isn't ridiculously expensive -- meaning that I don't have a killer competitor yet.

If I have any money left after my next paycheck, my Mastercard bill, and my tax payments are covered, I'll beef up Metal Earth again and keep my ads running. I desperately need a solid seller to supplement the somnolent Panther Vision line. Beanies did pretty well but the caps are a shadow of their former selves.

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I feared that Christmas had ended early when business crashed to just six sales on Dec. 10; ordinarily, the expiration date is Dec. 15 or later. Things came back strong yesterday so I guess the season still has legs. A $2,500 Panther Vision special order during this week last year doomed this December's prospects right from the start. If you subtract that outlier, my numbers are running slightly ahead of LY, but I'm not feeling the frenzy this year.

I don't know. Maybe we're building up to a big finish. This December's likely to rank low in the pantheon of Christmases, but it's probably going to be big enough to pay all the bills. That's really all I ask. I'm thoroughly tired of Christmas by now and ready for it to end.