December holiday sales plan for a c-store

On this page

1. The December 2026 calendar at a glance
2. Weeks 1 and 2: order, price and set the shelf
3. Week 3: the gift card counter
4. Week 3, continued: lottery as a gift
5. Week 4 and New Year’s: two long weekends of cash
6. The year-end count
7. What to do this week

How should a convenience store plan December? Start with the calendar, because this year it does most of the work for you. Christmas falls on a Friday, December 25, and New Year’s Day on Friday, January 1, 2027, so the month ends with two long weekends in a row when the Federal Reserve and most banks are closed. Around those weekends sits the busiest travel stretch of the year: AAA expected a record 122.4 million people to travel between December 20, 2025 and January 1, 2026, and 109.5 million of them by car. This plan takes December one week at a time, with the cash, the counter and the books each getting their turn.

The December 2026 calendar at a glance

Put these dates on the wall in the back room now, while there is still time to plan around them.

Dates	What happens	What it means for the store
Tue Dec 1 to Sun Dec 13	Normal weeks, holiday shopping building	Order, price and set the seasonal shelf
Mon Dec 14 to Sun Dec 20	Last full week before Christmas	Holiday staffing and the extra deliveries land
Mon Dec 21 to Thu Dec 24	Travel peak, last-minute gifts	Strongest crew, full coolers, extra change
Fri Dec 25 to Sun Dec 27	Christmas Day, banks closed Friday	Three days of cash in the safe
Mon Dec 28 to Thu Dec 31	Party supplies, New Year’s Eve	Beer, ice, snacks, mixers
Fri Jan 1 to Sun Jan 3	New Year’s Day, banks closed Friday	Three more days of cash in the safe; year-end count

The two Fridays are the ones that catch stores out. A store that normally makes a bank run every weekday goes from Thursday to Monday without a deposit, twice in eight days.

Weeks 1 and 2: order, price and set the shelf

The first half of December is for decisions, not rushes.

• Pull last December’s sales by department and by week. If you have them, the week of Christmas and the week of New Year’s are the two to study. Departments that doubled last year will probably jump again.
• Order the last-minute gifts and stocking stuffers early. Phone chargers, candy gift boxes, small toys and gift cards sell in the final days, when distributors are running their own holiday schedules. Ask each rep for their delivery days for the weeks of December 21 and December 28, and order a few days ahead of each.
• Plan for winter driving. If your area gets cold, ice melt, windshield washer fluid, scrapers, gloves and hand warmers sell on the first bad morning, not the week after.
• Set holiday prices and deals now. Build any multi-pack or mix-and-match deals, send them to the register and check that the shelf tags match before the busy weeks, not on December 23.
• Clear space. Extra beer, soda and ice for New Year’s Eve need room in the cooler and the freezer. Mark the items that have not sold in months and move them off the best shelves.

Worked example (made-up numbers). A store sold 40 phone chargers in the second half of last December, against about 12 in a normal two weeks. The owner orders 45 for the same stretch this year, with the delivery set for December 14. If the store had ordered on its usual schedule, the second delivery would have landed on December 28, after the gift buying was over. Use your own store’s sales for the same weeks; the point is to order from last December, not from November.

Week 3: the gift card counter

Gift cards are a December best seller, and they are also the way scammers most like to be paid. In the first nine months of 2021, the Federal Trade Commission recorded nearly 40,000 reports and about $148 million paid to scammers with gift cards, more than in all of 2020. The FTC is plain about it: no real business or government agency will tell someone to pay with a gift card.

A busy December counter is exactly where a scared customer, often on the phone with the scammer, buys several large cards at once. A short rule the crew can follow:

1. Watch for the signs. A large amount on several cards, a customer reading instructions from a phone call that stays on, or a customer in a hurry who seems frightened.
2. Ask one friendly question. “Are these gifts?” is enough. Scammers often coach people on what to say, so a nervous or rehearsed answer counts.
3. Have a dollar line that brings in the manager. Pick an amount for your store, write it on the register, and make it the clerk’s rule, not the clerk’s judgment.
4. Put the FTC’s free warning signs up. The FTC offers a Stop Gift Card Scams toolkit with a rack sign and a cashier card, free to print.
5. Inspect the rack. The FTC also warns that cards on a display can be tampered with. Check the packaging when you restock.

None of this costs a sale to an honest customer, and it can save a regular from losing their savings at your counter.

Week 3, continued: lottery as a gift

Scratch-off tickets go into a lot of holiday cards. Lotteries across the United States and Canada take part in the yearly Gift Responsibly campaign run by the National Council on Problem Gambling, which asks adults not to give lottery tickets to anyone under 18. Some states go further and make it illegal to give a ticket to a minor at all, so check your state lottery’s retailer rules and put its holiday signs at the counter if it sends them.

On the counting side, December brings more packs activated, more full packs sold as gifts and more small winners cashing in. Order your best-selling games and any seasonal games ahead of the week of December 21, and count every bin at every shift change, even on the busiest days. A skipped count in Christmas week is a missing ticket nobody can place in January.

Week 4 and New Year’s: two long weekends of cash

Work out how much cash will sit in the safe before it happens, not after.

Worked example (made-up numbers). A store normally deposits about $3,500 of cash a day. It makes its last deposit on Thursday, December 24, then holds Friday, Saturday and Sunday’s cash until Monday, December 28: about $10,500 in the safe, more if Christmas week runs busy. The same thing happens again from Thursday, December 31 to Monday, January 4. Ask three questions now:

• Can the safe hold that much, and is the store’s insurance limit for cash on hand high enough?
• Will the armored car, if you use one, run on December 24 and December 31, and at what time?
• Do you have enough change? Order extra ones, fives and rolled coin from the bank by mid-December, since there will be no bank run on either Friday.

During the rush, lower the drawer limit and drop more often. A full drawer on a crowded counter is the one you least want. Check large bills too: a rushed clerk is an easier target, so keep a counterfeit pen at each register and train clerks to use it on fifties and hundreds.

For New Year’s Eve, think beer, wine where you sell it, ice, mixers, cups, snacks and plastic cutlery. Alcohol sales hours on Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are set by your state and sometimes your county, so check your state alcohol agency’s rules for both holidays before you post your hours. Brief the crew on ID checks before the party crowd arrives.

The year-end count

January 1 is also when many stores take the year’s last inventory count. If your store keeps inventory for its taxes, IRS Publication 334 works out cost of goods sold from the inventory at the start of the year, plus purchases, minus the inventory at the end; the closing figure becomes next year’s opening one. The publication also explains that some small businesses are allowed to skip that method, so ask your accountant which applies to you.

Either way, a count on a quiet morning, January 2 or 3, gives a clean starting point for the new year:

• Count by department or category, and write down the date and the people counting.
• Make sure every December invoice is entered first, or the count will look short.
• Compare the count with what the store should have, and look hard at the categories that are off.
• List the items that sat all December. If they did not sell in the busiest month, they will not sell in February.

What to do this week

• Write the December 2026 dates above on the back-room calendar, with both bank-closed Fridays marked.
• Pull last December’s sales by department and by week.
• Ask every vendor and your armored car service for their holiday schedules.
• Decide the store’s gift card rule and its manager dollar line, and print the FTC’s signs.
• Order extra change from the bank for the weeks of December 21 and December 28.
• Pick the morning for the year-end count and who will do it.

Advantage helps with the pieces of this plan that live in the numbers. Sales Summary adds up last December for whatever dates you pick, the Top sellers report shows what moved, Dead Inventory lists the items that have not sold, order lists can be scanned, printed or e-mailed to a vendor, and the deals you build go to the register with Send to POS. Over the holidays, the phone app shows Live POS sales and alerts for voids and price overrides, so you can watch the store from a family dinner without calling the counter.