Julia Brown, toy buyer for the Hightower Department Stores, has to decide which of three imported stuffed animals will be offered for sale by the 16 Hightower stores during the approaching Christmas shopping season. The case is appropriately used as an introduction to the concepts of least squares and regression analysis. A linear relationship between realized and test-market sales can be used to forecast the sales potential of the three proposed animals, and an explicit treatment of the uncertainty in this forecast is necessary in order to decide how many of each adopted animal to order.