Happy holidays for retailers?

NEW YORK -- After raiding the nation's stores and malls as early as midnight Friday, the nation's shoppers pulled back on Saturday, resulting in a still solid start to the holiday shopping season, a national research firm that tracks retail sales said Monday.

According to ShopperTrak RCT Corp., which monitors sales at more than 45,000 retail outlets, sales for the combined Friday and Saturday period rose 3.4 percent to $14.66 billion compared to the corresponding period a year ago.

Retailers generated a better-than-expected 6 percent increase to $8.96 billion on the day after Thanksgiving, as early bird discounts on such items as flat-screen TVs and laptop computers drove crowds to stores during the pre-dawn hours. But on Saturday, total sales fell 0.4 percent from the same day a year ago, when shoppers expectedly took a break as the deals dissipated.

''It appears Black Friday's early promotions and corresponding strong sales performance may not have spilled over to equal strong increases for Black Saturday,'' Bill Martin, co-founder of ShopperTrak, said in a statement. ''Although Saturday's individual number was slightly down, the two-day increase retailers experienced remains very solid and seems to be corresponding to the strength we anticipated heading into the 2006 season.''

Black Friday -- so named because it was traditionally when the surge of shopping made stores profitable -- is generally no longer the busiest day of the season. That honor now falls to the last Saturday before Christmas.

But stores see Black Friday as setting an important tone to the overall season: what consumers see that day influences where they will shop for the rest of the season. According to the International Council of Shopping Centers, the three-day post Thanksgiving Day shopping rush accounted for 9.6 percent of the overall holiday sales in 2005. That compares with 9.2 percent in 2004.

AP