Holiday buyers skip mall shops

As the nation's retail executives began poring over, and in some cases despairing over, sales receipts from the holiday weekend, one pattern became clearer: Consumers mobbed discount chains, with their $398 laptops and 5 a.m. openings, but largely shopped right past other specialty retailers at the mall.

The disparity, analysts said, could indicate a tough season ahead for clothing retailers like Gap and Aeropostale and even deeper discounts for shoppers as the chains scramble to build momentum in the crucial approach to Christmas.

ShopperTrak, which measures purchases at 45,000 mall-based merchants, found that sales for the day after Thanksgiving fell 0.9 percent from last year, to $8.01 billion, a figure not adjusted for inflation.

"The specialty guys just got outgunned this time around," said John D. Morris, a retail analyst at Harris Nesbitt.

The winners, he said, were the discount chains with locations outside the malls, apparently the beneficiaries of an 11.4 percent increase in weekend spending among Visa USA cardholders. Wal-Mart reported that a record 10 million shoppers walked through its doors before noon Friday. In a recorded phone call over the weekend, the company said Friday sales "exceeded plans" and that consumers continued to shop after the early-morning discounts expired.

One possible explanation for the in-the-mall, outside-the-mall discrepancy: Discount chains, led by Wal-Mart, blitzed consumers with advertising well before Thanksgiving, opened their stores even earlier than last year and offered the most talked-about discounts, like a $188 15-inch flat-panel television at Circuit City and a $77 HP four-megapixel digital camera at Staples.

The mall-based merchants, on the other hand, largely avoided circulars or television advertising. Gap, in a surprising break with tradition, stopped marketing its marquee brand on TV after years of aggressive campaigns with stars like Sarah Jessica Parker, Missy Elliott and Joss Stone. (Gap, saying store traffic "deteriorated beyond anticipated levels," is predicting a relatively weak holiday.)

It appeared that the Web snatched at least some of the traditional mall business. ComScore Networks, a market research firm, said online purchases rose 22 percent for the day after Thanksgiving, to $305 million.

Later mall openings may have also hampered specialty retailers. "If you look at the retailers that went all out on Friday, many of them opened at 5 a.m. You did not see a lot of malls doing that," said Ellen Davis, a spokeswoman for the National Retail Federation, an industry trade group in Washington.