Cyber Monday? How about Slacker Monday

Shoppers showing upToday is CyberMonday, the digital equivalent to Black Friday when consumers flood the Internet to shop for alluring deals and rock-bottom prices.

I prefer to describe the day another way, what other scribes have dubbed as Slacker Monday. Stay home from work, stretch out on the couch, fire up the laptop and spend.

While traffic was heavy at some stores and Web sites on Black Friday and over the weekend, today promises to be another bellwether day in determining whether shoppers are in more of a spending mode this holiday season than last.

Some of the facts and figures and early impressions from the weekend's official start of the shopping season:

-- Some 195 million consumers visited stores and Webs sites over the weekend, up from 172 million last year, according to the National Retail Federation.

--Average spending over the weekend fell, however, to $343.31 a person, from $372.57 a year ago, the association said. Total spending was $41 billion, about the same as 2008.

--A majority of consumers shopped at big discount stores like Wal-Mart, according to NPD Group.

--Retail e-commerce for the first 27 days of the holiday season, this year Nove. 1 to 27, rose 3 percent to $10.57 billion, compared with the period last year. Only sales on Friday were $595 million, up 11 percent from a year ago, according to the retail federation.

-- Traffic at many big-name consumer electronics retailers was heavy over the weekend, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. Over half the consumers interviewed were in the store to buy a specific holiday gift and to take advantage of a specific promotion, CEA said.

More complete data on the start of the shopping season will come Thursday, when the nation's chain store release November sales.