SALES TO ASTONISH #38 - OCTOBER 2025.
The Monte Carlo Syndrome
Years ago,before the days of The Unreality Store, I used to play the fixed odds betting terminals in the local bookmakers. Not regularly, once or twice a month, and more often out of boredom than anything else. And I only ever played one game - roulette.
I’d never played roulette before, or been in a casino for that matter, but had seen it played in film & TV. Granted the environment inside the local Ladbrokes was a far cry from the tables of Las Vegas or Macao but the game remains the same wherever. Initially I dabbled with spreading my bets on a few numbers or backing red over black, odds over evens but it wasn’t long before I settled on a bet that I didn’t alter in the time I first laid it to the last time I left a bookies - £10 on the Zero
Now this was back in the day before Government gambling legislation changed to reduce the maximum amount of money you could place on one spin of the wheel, which back then was £100. You couldn’t put £100 on one number as that would mean the payout at 36-1 odds would have been £3,600 but I dare say you could have placed £10 on a red number and then £10 on red and so on to increase the payout but for me £10 on Zero meant that as and when it came in it a receipt with £360 on it could be taken to the counter to be cashed in. The trick was to get the machine to payout out as early in your time playing it, ideally your first spin, so you were £350 to the good. The longer you went on the less the prize money would be and heaven forbid that you span the wheel 36 times because then you needed a win to be back where you began. Or you started chasing it to mitigate your losses.
Now the difference in my mind between a roulette table in a casino and a fixed odds terminal is that the latter is programmed to pay out at some point. The more you play and the more money the machine takes should in effect increase the chances of a payout in much the same fashion as an old style fruit machine (and yes in my time frequenting pubs in my teens and twenties I did play those too!). I’m guessing that playing roulette at a table is a little more strategic and this is where your covering bets come into play rather than betting the proverbial house on just one number.
The Monte Carlo Syndrome (or the less glamorous Gambler’s Fallacy) is a mistaken belief that after a long losing streak a win is due in the future to correct the imbalance. Apparently back in 1913 at a casino in Monte Carlo the ball landed on a black number 26 consecutive spins. Those present at the casino then went in big on red in the belief that a red was due and you’ve guessed it….. the ball landed on black.
Now the reason I bring this up is that my regular releases on Thursday and Saturday are a gamble. There’s no science behind what I drop into the store, rather the new stock each week is determined by what I’ve sold over the previous weeks, what I’ve acquired and also from time to time to try something new that ordinarily I hadn’t thought there would be a market for. If any of these fail, like the release on Thursday 9th October when I didn’t sell a single item from the new stock, I default to the Monte Carlo syndrome and think that the more stock I put into the store increases the chance of eventually having a day where the stars align and I sell hundreds of pounds of comics and other stuff. Much like a gambler these winning days do happen occasionally but they are rare and it’s how you manage the times in between that are a real test of your mettle
One thing I had become aware of over the last couple of months is the amount of times items are added into carts. This had increased dramatically from the beginning of the year although the number of sales I was making clearly meant that there were lots of items in carts that had yet to make it to checkout. This kind of fed into the Monte Carlo Syndrome in as much as I felt I needed to try to do something to force the issue to get people to clear their carts. Hence a 33% off early Halloween sale.
I wanted to try to do something different with this sale so instead of limiting the timeframe to 24 hours, I decided to run it from 20th to 31st October which meant not only did it cover October’s payday but also there would be more new stock entering the store that would automatically be marked down by a third. If one of the barriers to getting people over the line was the £30 free postage threshold I had hoped that the arrival of new stock in addition to what was held in carts would amount to over £30.
The sale went reasonably well, it was initially limited to email subscribers but in the final few days I opened it up to the wider public. The final day was by far the best with Halloween 2025 becoming a landmark for Friday takings. Over the course of the sale I sold lots of Batman titles, Dark Horse Star Wars, some Image issues, roleplaying hardcovers and modules but oddly not too many Marvel comics.
Equally as odd is the fact that every time I run I sale my rate of cart abandonment goes up. This October was no different and there were a couple of significantly large carts that got to checkout and failed to proceed. It goes without saying that this is disappointing and would have really put the gloss on October but it’s far more puzzling. I’m baffled that once you’ve spent the time to assemble an order, and in these cases it must have taken a while, that for whatever reason the sale doesn’t proceed. Initially I thought it may be a problem with the website but I’d taken sales on the same day as these abandoned orders and also there are various mechanisms such as the chat function on the site to get in touch if there are any problems. A friend suggested it may be the different payment platforms I offer as people have preferences over which system they use but I keep an eye on that and all seemed to be working fine. So I still remain in the dark as to the reasons, and the stock remains available
I think October kind of heralds the countdown to Christmas. In a lot of stores you can already see the Christmas decorations sharing shelf space with the Halloween stuff. And as a result I think that people start to keep an eye on their spending with a view that the gift buying season has arrived and there’s only 2 paydays left until Christmas. Had I not run the sale then October would have been a very poor month. Even with the sale it wasn’t as good as September so maybe that adds to the feeling that people are keeping an eye on Christmas approaching and that’s the reason for the abandoned carts. I do wonder whether online retail giants like Amazon and Teemu have similar experiences (albeit on a much larger scale than The Unreality Store 🤣🤣)
To close the only thing that really matters at this point is the bills are paid, there’s food on the table and the furries (cats & rabbit) are fed. Tick those boxes and all is good in the hood!
See you next month 😎
