I assume you’ve started seeing Christmas items fill the spaces recently occupied by Halloween items at your local retailers. In fact, you’ve probably been seeing that for at least a week. The rush to rearrange stock for the next big selling season means the current one doesn’t always get enough time for itself.

Case in point: My girlfriend took a little while to settle on a costume for this year, as many people do, and found herself in need of one accessory to bring the whole thing together. It wasn’t something obscure or weird, just a small plastic skull — the sort of thing any right-thinking person would associate with Halloween. Costume stores didn’t have ‘em. Toy stores didn’t have ‘em. Mega-pharmacy chains didn’t have ‘em. It wasn’t a question of being picky; we would have accepted anything reasonably sturdy and shaped like a human skull, since she was going to be painting it and making some alterations anyway. A week of hunting and more than a dozen shops later, she finally found something serviceable. It’s not that the shops were sold out. They had already started scaling back their inventory — and this includes the dedicated costume stores in Manhattan — and skulls were on the list of things to chop early.

Second case in point: I haven’t been able to buy polo shirts since August. Yes, polo shirts are boring and you probably don’t need to know how many of them I try to keep in my wardrobe, but they are the right combination of casual and collared to take me through most days and nights. I’m a little hard to fit, so I find a source and stick with it as best I can. But my sources dried up in midsummer to make room for sweaters. Maybe I don’t get the clothing inductry or fashion in general, but I can’t think more than one season ahead. What happened to the fall line?

Things like this make me more and more happy that we have e-commerce. Granted, my beloved Uniqlo polo shirts aren’t available online, but they might be someday. Everything’s available somewhere out there. There will always be a place for bricks and mortar, but it seems less and less attractive to me every time I have to buy something.

Speaking of e-commerce, MyVirtualModel and IBM Websphere have partnered to create a means of trying on clothing without having to leave your keyboard — sort of. Users can create a 2D or 3D model with their own measurements (and even face) that will model outfits for you. The 3D mannequins are the most interesting ones, as you can rotate them and really get a feel for what you’d look like. Launched last week with Sears.com, the virtual model and IBM product database combine to make shopping easier. It includes a visual search — something they developed with the Fashion Institute of Technology here in New York — to make online clothing searches less painful. You can play around with model-making here, or go to the Sears site to see what they’ve implemented so far (it appears to only have women’s clothing set up at present).

In addition to shopping at home, virtual models are handy to mitigate the problem of limited dressing room space. a few terminals at strategic points in the shop will help keep fitting room lines down, reduce the amount of folding and restocking employees must do, and possibly even reduce shoplifting. This is especially welcome in cities like New York, where there’s so little floor space available.

The models aren’t necessarily flattering if you’re honest with the measurements. They’re not supposed to be. Besides, it’s better to be depressed and frustrated in private than in a dressing room.