Shopping Season

Touting extended hours and extra markdowns on everything from leather coats to coffee makers, retailers are hoping an anticipated burst in spending the last week before Christmas will help make up for a slow start to the crucial holiday shopping season.Retailers are counting on shoppers packing the stores this final week, lured by promotions and colder weather, and buying everything from electronics to home merchandise to the winter apparel that had languished on the racks during unseasonably warm weather after Thanksgiving.

Looking for a little holiday cheer yesterday, Mary Ann Hugg found it in Annapolis at the Christmas Spirit shop on Main Street where business was brisk and smiles were plentiful."

AS SOON AS the holiday shopping season begins, I start chanting this incantation: "Just pretend it is a hardware store. Just pretend it is a hardware store."I do this when I find myself in one of those "other" stores, the kind of store that sells clothes or household furnishings. The kind of store you have to visit when you buy presents for people on your holiday gift list.I do this to get myself in a hardware-store kind of mood. I am comfortable prowling around a hardware store. But I get uneasy when I have to spend much time in places where you are supposed to "shop."

Bandits, muggers and purse snatchers appear to be getting an early start on their season of preying on holiday shoppers, Anne Arundel police say.Police say they usually don't see an increase in robberies until after Thanksgiving, when the holiday shopping season officially begins. But this year the robberies seem to be coming earlier.Sgt. Norman Milligan, a supervisor in the robbery unit, said statistics for October are not complete, but that he has noticed a surge in street robberies and purse snatchings in the past two months.

If an early survey is right, this holiday shopping season will end up being a disappointing one for many retailers.The International Council of Shopping Centers said yesterday that its annual survey of the season shows a 3 percent gain over 1995, which was a dismal year.Two months ago, most retailers and analysts had predicted at least a 4 percent gain -- and were hoping for better.But John Konarski, vice president of research at ICSC, called the gain "impressive," noting that there were five fewer shopping days this year between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Pam McDowell wishes Christmas could have been pushed back another week.She's not a holiday scrooge. She's just thrilled with what the holiday shopping season did for her husband's business.In a sampling of stores in Harford County, other businesspeople had similar positive feelings about sales in the Christmas season."It's definitely been good for us," said Ms. McDowell, whose husband, Ralph McDowell, owns The Woodworks, an Aberdeen shop that sells handmade wooden toys. "And I'm definitely not complaining, but we need more shopping days."

Fortified with turkey and heavily armed with plastic, armies of Marylanders stormed area stores yesterday, stalking gifts and everyday goods in an annual ritual so entrenched in American culture that it invites the question: Did the Pilgrims go shopping the day after Thanksgiving?Most merchants reported robust sales for the day -- the traditional kickoff of the holiday shopping season -- and predicted that cash register totals for the season would surpass last year's. Some retailers said consumers also were spending more per person.

Retailers prepare for Black Friday -- the start of the Christmas shopping season -- almost like soldiers getting ready for battle.They hire and train extra staff, discuss strategy and even install more cash registers. They psych themselves up to handle the crush of customers, and they discuss the importance of good customer relations with their sales staffs.But it's not always easy to handle the shopping hordes, clerks and cashiers say."Everyone wants to get in and get the same things," says Jonas White, a salesman at Chesapeake Knife and Tool Co. at the White Marsh Mall.

Christmas shoppers are spending and charging with abandon this year, boosting revenues for many retailers in the county over last year's holiday shopping season."

Most of the evidence I needed was there in the parking lot.man dressed as a toy soldier walked about on stilted legs, directing traffic to available parking spaces. Inside, one of his comrades walked around greeting children.And the message was clear: The Christmas shopping season is upon us and -- dare I say it -- the recession is over. Happy holidays, one and all!I say all of this with an air of confidence only because of observations I've made over the last few years, all of which I'm proud to say were later confirmed by sagging retail sales figures and the fact that several major retailers went belly up in the process.

Consumers are expected to pack stores and malls this weekend for a final stretch of shopping before Christmas, but they probably won't spend enough to turn around what has been a difficult holiday season for retailers. Desperate retailers trying to clear out racks of merchandise will pull out all the stops to squeeze that last dollar from shoppers in what has already been a season of steep discounts. JCPenney will slash prices as high as 70 percent on some items, while Loehmann's is offering 25 percent off entire purchases through Christmas Eve. Macy's will open 13 stores throughout the country for 24 hours, including Tysons Corner, Va., in the Baltimore-Washington area.

Jon Vincent expects more visitors to his blackfriday.info Web site this Thursday and Friday than he had all of last November. The Boston-area resident suspects that mostly has to do with shoppers hungering for bargains in a bleak economy and partly to do with people becoming more comfortable with searching and shopping online. "Traffic has doubled since last year," said Vincent, 28, who reserved the blackfriday.info domain name in 2004 after trying to help his parents shop online. He also created the Web coupon site keepcash.

Tami Scovitch parked herself on a bench outside of teen clothing store Hollister after being dragged around The Mall in Columbia twice yesterday by her teenage daughter and a friend, who were eager to spend their Christmas cash and gift cards. "They've been wearing me out all morning," said the 45-year-old deli manager from Elkridge, surrounded by bags of clothes the girls had already bought or exchanged. "They couldn't wait to get to the mall to spend." Retailers are hoping that families like the Scovitches will help give a boost to the holiday shopping season, which many analysts said is suffering from cautious spending by consumers worried about the economy.

Too often this week, Xavier Henry would look across the racks of sweater dresses, skinny jeans and other trendy clothing at his Melrose Place Boutique and see few, if any, customers. It's indicative of the sluggish holiday shopping season. Consumers stressed out about high energy, gas and food prices have cut back on their spending. Retailers such as Henry, whose store is at Security Square Mall, are hoping their bottom lines will improve starting today. It's the final weekend of the holiday shopping season, when procrastinators and those holding out for the steepest discounts are expected to crowd stores for last-minute shopping.

The holiday shopping season kicked off in typical frenzied fashion yesterday with pre-dawn bargains, midnight store openings, clogged Internet sites and long lines, fueling a cultural tradition that helps to set the tone for how retailers finish out the year. Early reports by retail executives predicted strong sales yesterday. And the industry hoped that showing would continue throughout the weekend, when 137 million people are expected to visit stores. Known as Black Friday because it often was when retailers posted their first profits of the year, the day after Thanksgiving has become a marketing bonanza, with consumers competing for steep discounts on limited items, traffic jams and marathon shopping excursions.

MARYLAND Mid dies in car accident A Naval Academy midshipman was killed yesterday morning when the car he was riding in lost control and crashed near Davidsonville in an accident that police suspect might have involved alcohol, authorities said. Second class Midshipman Charles B. Carr, 20, was declared dead at the scene. pg 1B Methadone clinic plans opening As the Baltimore County government appeals a ruling preventing it from enforcing a law designed to keep drug treatment centers out of neighborhoods, a methadone clinic might open in Dundalk.

Renee Hoyt is looking for one thing as she buys Christmas presents for family and friends this holiday season: deals. The 36-year-old from Essex started her Christmas shopping last week with a stop at Security Square Mall. She then headed to a nearby J.C. Penney to check out the 50 percent discounts for many items. Shoppers like Hoyt have lucked out so far this year. Many retailers such as Wal-Mart and J.C. Penney slashed prices weeks ago to convince shoppers to buy before the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, which begins Friday.

A 24 percent jump in Internet sales from last year helped ward off an otherwise lackluster Christmas shopping season for the nation's retailers. Consumers' growing comfort with Internet shopping coupled with aggressive campaigns promising gift deliveries by Christmas - even if ordered as late as Dec. 23 - helped propel Internet sales to the best showing since online sales records began being tracked in 1999. Electronic sales rose to an estimated $20 billion compared with $4.7 billion six years ago. "I try to do as much as possible online," said Jay Carroll, of Palatine, Ill., who said he used his computer to buy a digital camera for his wife and a skateboard and accessories for his 11-year-old son. "I like the convenience, and I'm not a shopper."

A weekend full of bargains and promotions seems to have paid off for retailers, with several early surveys showing the holiday shopping season getting off to a promising start - though some experts said stores must offer more discounts to keep consumers buying. Reports released yesterday found that U.S. retail sales increased over the holiday weekend compared with a year ago. Visa USA, for example, said purchases by people using its cards at more than 6 million retail merchants jumped 11 percent from last year, to $3.7 billion for Friday and Saturday.

The shoppers, shivering in 36-degree darkness, were already lining up outside the Toys "R" Us in Rosedale before 4 a.m. for the Day after Thanksgiving shopping madness, and sales associate Carlos McClain wasn't a bit nervous. After all, dealing with mobs of adults fighting over toys couldn't be any harder than mediating fights over toys among his own eight children. "I crave days like this," McClain said as he placed SALE signs on bicycles. "If it's not busy, it's not a good day." Shoppers kicked off the holiday shopping season before sunrise yesterday, forming long lines outside stores as they looked for bargains, filled a day off work or school, or just came to be part of the craziness.