Expanded Hours, Discounts Lure Shoppers

Bargain shoppers headed to the nation's stores and malls before the sun rose on Friday to nab specials on everything from toys to flat-screen TVs as the holiday shopping season officially opened.

Retailers heightened their pitch to shoppers with expanded hours, generous discounts and free money in the form of gift cards to lure consumers in a slowing but still steady economy. A growing number of stores and malls unlocked their doors at midnight to jump-start the season. CompUSA Inc. and BJ's Wholesale Club Inc. even opened on Thanksgiving for the first time.

"Retailers are doing more to get consumers into the stores earlier this year," said C. Britt Beemer, chairman of America's Research Group, based in Charleston, S.C.

This year, a growing number of shoppers like Sean Humphreys headed straight from their turkey dinner to the malls to take advantage of midnight openings.

"I wanted to see if I could get anything early," said Humphreys, who was picking out clothing at a Ralph Lauren Polo store at 12:04 a.m. Friday at the Premium Outlet Center 25 miles north of Dallas.

Chelsea Premium Outlets, the center's owner, experimented with the early start last year and more than tripled the number of participating centers this year, including three of its Texas outlets.

At a Wal-Mart store in Cincinnati, Gary Miller, a 45-year-old computer programmer, was at the discounter at 5 a.m. to hunt for a 20-inch LCD television that he had seen advertised online.

"My wife sent me out for this one," he said, pointing to the television in his shopping cart. "But then I saw this one (a 20-inch conventional TV) for $85 and said, what the heck, I'll get that one, too."

Meanwhile, Monica Midkiff, a 27-year-old homemaker from Peebles, Ohio, said she got up at 3:30 a.m. to go to Wal-Mart for a VTech game system.

"They usually cost about $60, but this was on sale for $30. That's a deal," she said.

Midkiff said she was on her way next to KB Toys and Toys "R" Us while her husband took care of their five children. She said she didn't mind the crowded stores on Friday morning.

Also at the Wal-Mart in Cincinnati was Clint Stapleton, 20, a construction worker from Mount Orab, who said he was happy with the deal he got on one of Wal-Mart's featured items, a 32-inch LCD TV. He said he paid $630 for a TV that usually costs about $1,000.

"After I got that, I said, that's enough, but I think I'll still look for an Xbox somewhere," Stapleton said, referring to the game console made by Microsoft Corp.

In Albany, Ga., Cheryl Haley, 37, was among the 300 people lined up outside a Circuit City store when it opened at 5 a.m.

"This is the only thing on my little boy's list," said Haley, of Albany, Ga., pointing to the store circular advertising a $299 laptop. "I couldn't pay $800 for it."

She and her sister, Wendy Blount, 35, of nearby Lee County, argued over who earned the spot at the head of the line.

"I drove her here, so I'm first," Blount said.

Eric Gordon, 30, of Albany, arrived half an hour before the store opened - far too late to get one of the limited number of bargain computers.

"I should have stayed in bed and shopped online," he said. He noted it was his first Black Friday shopping experience.

Plenty of shoppers, like Rochelle Little, 28, of Palmyra, N.J., had been preparing for Black Friday since mid-October, helped by of a swath of new Web sites, like blackfriday.info and fatwallet.com, that post retailers' deals.

Little monitored a Web site called BFAds.net to help plan her shopping excursion - as precisely as a military campaign - which began with Toys "R" Us before planned stops at Wal-Mart and Target. She said the planning worked. Little was able to get her 7-year-old son Taron Hampton, a razo motorized scooter for $99 - a savings of $70 - and a Robosapien remote control robot for $30.

While Black Friday officially starts holiday shopping, it's generally no longer the busiest day of the season - that honor now falls to the last Saturday before Christmas. Stores see Black Friday as setting an important tone to the overall season, however: What consumers see that day influences where they will shop for the rest of the season.

Last year, total Black Friday sales dipped 0.9 percent to $8 billion from the year before, dampened by deep discounting, according to Shopper Trak RCT Corp., which tracks total sales at more than 45,000 mall-based retail outlets. For the Thanksgiving weekend, total sales rose just 0.4 percent to $16.8 billion.

Last year, merchants ended up meeting their holiday sales projections, helped by a last-minute buying surge and post-Christmas shopping.

This year, analysts expect robust holiday sales gains for the overall retail industry, though the pace is expected to be slower than a year ago. The National Retail Federation projects a 5 percent gain in total holiday sales for the November-December period, less than the 6.1 percent in the year-ago period.

Meanwhile, the International Council of Shopping Centers estimates sales at stores open at least a year will rise 3 percent in the November-December period, less than last year's 3.6 percent.

---

Associated Press Writers Geoff Mulvihill in Mount Laurel, N.J., Elliott Minor, in Albany, Ga., Steve Quinn in Dallas, Tex., Ron Word in Jacksonville, Fla., and Terry Kinney in Cincinnati contributed to this report.