I have a dc.js ordinal chart whose x-axis consists of things like \'Cosmetics\' and the y-axis is the number of sales. I want to sort the chart by sales decreasing, however
No doubt this is a bug.
As a workaround, you could sort the data yourself instead of using the ordering function, as described in the FAQ.
I filed a bug report: https://github.com/dc-js/dc.js/issues/598