The annual shopping extravaganza of Black Friday rolls on

Relatively new Thanksgiving night sales by some major retailers are upstaging the typical Black Friday sales events.

“We like the environment, the momentum”, the elder Pineda said as he sat on the mall floor next to several bags filled with the family’s Black Friday haul.

(Chris Heller/The Houma Daily Courier via AP).

On Thanksgiving Day alone, a record $771 million of products were purchased on mobile devices.

(Justin Wan/Sioux City Journal via AP). He even made sure to be one of the first 100 in line at World Market to get a free tote for his bride-to-be.

Then there are people like Vanessa Fernandes, who said this year is the earliest she’s ever been out with her mom for Black Friday shopping.

Crowds were thin at USA malls and stores on Black Friday morning, formerly the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, and online channels were expected to show the strongest gains in sales over past year. It’s also becoming an American export to other countries. For example, Friday’s atmosphere at Los Cerritos Center was anything but quiet, with the sounds of shoppers’ conversations echoing off the shopping center’s walls.

“It used to be very busy, but for the past two years the mornings are not very insane”, said Gina Reynolds, a 39-year-old housewife who was shopping at a Macy’s store in the Water Tower Place Mall in Chicago. She was looking for a big-screen TV at the Best Buy store in Howell Township, New Jersey. She had been shopping for nearly eight hours, also having stopped at the Vacaville outlets before the Fairfield mall. Her must-have item a laptop for a daughter in college. His online shop posted discounts of 30 percent. If you do it online, you save and you can get it delivered right to the house for free.

One of the stores that opened later in the night stayed open only three hours, instead of the six a year ago. “When they were kids, I was the guy up at 1 or 2 in the morning when the doors opened and the employees went running”. Shoppers have the wherewithal to spend, and now retailers are hoping the holiday season will give them a reason to.

While not included in the 137.4 million total for the Thanksgiving weekend, 36 percent of consumers say they plan to shop online on Cyber Monday, up from the 34 percent in 2015, according to the NFR.

In-store shopping began to pick up in the afternoon, but the increase in customer traffic paled in comparison to the jump in online sales, analysts said. He said he doesn’t usually do Black Friday shopping, but was drawn to a deal on a 55-inch Sharp television.

He added that the only way people would be able to get the best deals was to use a price-tracker over a period of time – something that “we would never be able to know in a high street unless you are going to walk in with a spreadsheet”. “Now we start on Thanksgiving so it’s a lot more spread out”.

“It was a really good start. I like it”, Henson said. He believes the weekend’s sales will likely rise from previous year because shoppers did lots of buying, including pricey flat-screen TVs.

The holiday shopping season, which runs through Thanksgiving and Christmas on Dec 25, can account for as much as 40 percent of retailers´ annual sales. That excludes vehicle sales, gas and restaurant receipts.

USA retail spending is expected to rise 3.6 percent to $655.8 billion in November and December, the Washington-based NRF estimates.

Best Buy wasn’t scheduled to open until 8 a.m., but Dane Swartzentruber and two fellow shoppers had formed the beginning of a line at 6:10 a.m.