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 looks at Black Friday sales and comments on Wizards of the Coast pulling a recently announced Secret Lair.
From what I have read and heard from other retailers, this past Black Friday’s sales were what my grandfather used to call a “barnburner,” with a number of stores reporting lines of customers waiting for the store to open. Most stores only report this amount of customer enthusiasm on Free Comic Book Day. I heard from several stores that exceeded their 2024 Black Friday sales by mid-afternoon, so customers are ready and willing to spend.
I still am not a fan of scheduling Small Business Saturday on the Saturday after Thanksgiving as that makes it impossible to tell how much of the increased sales are due to Small Business Saturday and how much is due to the day naturally being one of busiest shopping days of the year (see “Mastercard Thinks It Will Be a Good Retail Season“). Since Small Business Saturday is essentially a promotional tool for American Express, I see very little promotion for Small Business Saturday outside of AmEx and Main Street, to which American Express is donating $1 for each purchase at a qualifying store which has registered for Small Business Saturday and accepts AmEx.
And did you know there is a Pink Friday, focusing on small business sales as well? Apparently, the Boutique Hub has created its own shopping event, joining Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday. At least scheduling the event the Friday before Thanksgiving weekend gives stores a better idea of the effect the promotion of Pink Friday has on the day’s sales.
Also during the past week, Wizards of the Coast announced they had pulled the plug on the revealed Monster Hunter X Secret Lair set (see “’Monster Hunter’ Secret Lair“) due to unspecified problems with the set, which is now planned for release in 2026. The press release is not specific as to what the problems are with the set, but commentors pointed out the lack of equipment in the set, which is pretty striking given how important weapons and gear are in the game. In addition, “Kokoto” was misspelled on one card, a pretty glaring error.
This is the second high profile product WotC has pulled this year due to problems. Eberron: Forge of the Artificer, scheduled for release last August, got pushed back to a late November release due to warped covers necessitating a full recall of the book. Those are a couple of expensive errors that WotC proofreading and quality control didn’t catch. In fact, I cannot remember WotC making major mistakes requiring such a costly recall in decades. The largest WotC recall I can remember was back in 1981, when the entire first print run (save for a few copies already delivered to stores) of the Dungeons & Dragons module B3 Palace of the Silver Princess (aka the “orange cover”) was recalled the day of release and between 5,000 and 10,000 copies destroyed. In this case, TSR management either found some of the art too sexual, such as a bound woman tormented by demonic-looking creatures, or objected to the caricatures of members of TSR management as the heads of assorted monsters. One would think they would have caught this before printing 5,000 copies (my store did manage to get a copy of the orange cover some years ago and sold it for around $1,000).
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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.
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