Feverish festivities — Thousands jam stores as holiday shopping season begins

MURRAY — At just before 1 a.m. Friday, Jessica Taylor's face showed her frustration as she bumped and jostled her way through wall-to-wall people at Fashion Place mall.

That's right, 1 a.m.

"If we don't buy something in the next 20 minutes, we're going to leave," Taylor told three other empty-handed women she came with for the mall's midnight opening. "I'm not sure the prices outweigh this — the people, the chaos."

In what was a unique move Friday in Utah and a sign of an emerging post-Thanksgiving Day trend among malls around the country, Fashion Place opened its doors at 12 a.m. to kick off the Christmas shopping season.

That's because malls have begun gunning for a share of the big-box holiday crowd.

"We realized in order to try and get shoppers to come to the mall first, we had to open sooner," said Tamara DeMilt, Fashion Place's senior marketing manager.

The quarry this year is an anticipated 7.5 percent increase in holiday retail sales over last year's numbers, according to Visa USA. Tactics on how to capture those sales are getting more aggressive.

Many Wal-Marts are already open 24 hours a day, offering holiday deals well in advance of "Black Friday," a day when retailers begin to move from the fiscal red, signifying losses, into their most profitable time of the year.

Throughout the nation, stores like Kmart and CompUSA were open on Thanksgiving Day, according to CNN. Fashion Place's wee-hours welcome mat drew the interest of the New York Times, which was there to witness retail history.

For Sara Homer, manager of a Down East Basics kiosk that was selling women's T-shirts, the mall's odd starting time seemed worth it.

"I had no idea so many people would be waiting outside," Homer said as she readied for the surge. "I'm pleasantly surprised by the turnout."

Rush hour

Friday's mall crowd was supposed to go through one entrance at the food court, filing past the aroma of Mexican and Chinese food. But in another concourse, someone accidentally opened an entrance and thousands came streaming through just before midnight.

The initial rush was mostly teenagers, running and screaming through the mall, which stayed open until 10 p.m. Friday.

"It was crazy," said Denise Castaneda, 20, whose arm and stomach were hurt when she was slammed into a door by a wave of shoppers as they shoved and pushed their way into the mall at the main entrance.

"I tried to push myself off. By the time I got out, all these people were running and falling," she said. "It was crazy."

The marketing logo for the mall's "Rockin' Shoppin' Eve" was a coffee cup, a reminder of the free java and hot cocoa available to all.

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