A big shopping day? Try a big couple of hours

By the time the sun peaks over the Virginia Range at 6:54 a.m.

on Nov.

25, cash registers will have been ringing at some major retailers for nearly two hours.

The JC Penney store in the Meadowood Mall will have been open since 5 a.m.Macy's and Sears stores will have opened at 6, and the mall itself will unlock the doors a few minutes after sunrise.

Other big retailers will follow suit, trying to capture as much of consumers' holiday budgets as possible in the first few hours of the holiday season.

In Nevada, where the holiday shopping season effectively begins on Nevada Day, the importance of the day after Thanksgiving is somewhat lessened.

Still, the first few hours of the season generate a significant portion of many retailers' holiday sales, says Cynthia Moore, marketing director of Meadowood Mall.

And that short burst of high-energy consumerism presents a challenge to marketers, she says, because two distinctly different groups of buyers are represented.

One group,Moore says, includes families on tightly controlled holiday budgets, folks who rely on promotional pricing to complete their shopping.

"They shop when it's most effective," she says.

On the other hand,Moore says, the earlymorning shoppers include families for whom the pre-dawn excursion is a holiday tradition.

"It's a way for them to spend time with family and get in the holiday mood," she says.

While JC Penney is more than happy to see customer spending before daybreak, it relies on the early shopping hours for more than sales.

"It's a time we can gauge our customers and their spending habits," says Quinton Crenshaw, a spokesman for the retail giant based at Plano, Texas.

And the indicators gathered during those first few hours help establish strategy for the remainder of the holiday season.

Smaller independent retailers many of them truly mom-and-pop shops are less enamored with pre-dawn openings on the day after Thanksgiving.

While the Gottschalks store at Reno's Park Lane Mall will open at 6 a.m., the mall itself a center dominated by independent retailers won't open until 9 a.m.

"Park Lane is what it is a lot of mom and- pop stores," says Victoria Harley, the mall's manager."They don't want to come in at 6 o'clock in the morning, and they don't have the employees to do it."

No matter what the clock says when they open, retailers like the calendar for this year's Christmas season.

It gives them Christmas Eve on a Saturday potentially a huge day as well as a Saturday-to-Saturday week following Christmas.

That's become an increasing important week for retailers, partly because so many people receive gift cards at the holidays.