Eager Shoppers Ring It Up on 'Red-Eye Thursday'

A hotel shuttle took the girlfriends and a handful of other shoppers who had booked the package trip to the outlets, circumventing parking lots that were full shortly after midnight. The bumper-to-bumper traffic was forgotten at the first rack of clothes at the first store Oskey entered.

"C'mon now, $9.99? This rocks!" she said as she sorted through a rack of men's fleece jackets at Haggar. "Are you only allowed one per customer?"

It was 12:30 a.m., and the line at the lone cash register was already seven people deep -- one of the shortest lines of the night.

The Leesburg outlets were among 25 shopping centers around the country run by Chelsea Property Group to open at midnight. After a successful test at seven locations last year, the company expanded the midnight opening to almost all of its properties.

"It created a lot of excitement to get people to come to us first," said Michele Rothstein, a Chelsea Property spokeswoman. "We're all out there trying to capture the attention and the spending of customers."

Eight malls owned by Greensboro, N.C.-based Tanger Factory Outlet Centers opened at midnight, as did a dozen run by Baltimore-based Prime Retail Inc., including one in Hagerstown.

Retailers said they would not begin tallying the number of shoppers until today but that anecdotal reports indicated strong traffic. Wal-Mart's Web site crashed yesterday because of high volume. Jim Martin, vice president of ShopperTrak, said he expected yesterday's traffic to be comparable to last year's. Early openings might not draw more shoppers but spread them throughout the day, he said.

Some retailers even opened on Thanksgiving Day. CompUSA was open from 9 p.m. to midnight. Kmart checked out shoppers from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., following a long-standing tradition. Gail Lavielle, a Kmart spokeswoman, said that customers "like having different alternatives and being able to shop all weekend."

But locked doors and dark windows weren't enough to stop some people from showing up to cash in on yesterday's blockbuster promotions. About a dozen shoppers arrived at Fair Oaks Mall in Fairfax at 11 p.m. on Thursday, reported parent company Taubman Centers, to claim spots in line at Elite Boardshop and Sears -- which opened at 5 a.m. and offered a plasma TV for $1,199.99.

Showing up at 4:30 a.m. meant you were downright late. That's when Jae Shim, 41, of Olney arrived at Best Buy in Germantown, where a long line had beat him. He and a friend waited two hours to get inside and another two hours to pay for a DVD player, video games and some movies.

"What we wanted we didn't even get," said Shim, who wanted to snag a Hewlett-Packard laptop for $380. "We could barely get in the store. It was crazy. They said, 'We're out of this; we're out of that.' "

Meanwhile, Oskey was blowing through her Christmas list of about two dozen people long before other retailers flicked on their lights. But even she had her limits. She quickly dashed out of Pottery Barn after seeing that the line wrapped around half the store.

"There's nothing in here I want that bad," she said.

By 3 a.m., she was back in bed. Her list was all checked off, and the only thing left to do in the morning was get a massage and mani-pedi at the hotel spa.

Staff writer Dana Hedgpeth contributed to this report.