This past holiday weekend marked the official start to the holiday shopping season.
Nationally, spending in stores fell 10 percent from last year on both Thanksgiving and Black Friday, according to retailing research firm ShopperTrak.
Locally - Amy Norgate, General Manager for Tanger Outlets in Rehoboth Beach says a little over 80,000 vehicles visited between last Thursday and Sunday - not much of an increase over last year.
"We definitely saw our strongest time on Thursday night between, let’s say 10 p.m. and midnight. And then again the next day on Friday from about 10am through like 4 or 5 p.m.," she says.
Norgate adds she doesn’t have a hard number on sales yet, but according to an initial random sample, stores with deep discounts saw the highest sales figures.
Norgate adds she doesn’t have a hard number on sales yet, but an initial random sample indicates some stores fared better than others.
"And it was really driven by the number of deals. People were looking for deals, and those stores that had deep discounts really saw a lot of sales happen in their stores," she says.
She added that the warm weather brought out more people to the outlets than might have otherwise come - and that many shoppers came in from New Jersey and Maryland.
