Ann Arbor's largest regional mall will mark this year's Black Friday with more anchor stores planning to open earlier than ever before.

Briarwood Mall is following the lead of many malls and "big box" retailers across the U.S. by setting early opening hours to attract more shoppers in a year when many retail forecasts say the holiday shopping season could be flat to down as much as 4 percent over a poor 2008.

But Ida Hendrix, mall manager, says her retailers are trying to position themselves to grab a bigger share of Black Friday, when as many as 60 million U.S. shoppers could be hitting the nation's stores and spending over $10 billion on Friday - and spending a total of $43 billion over the Thanksgiving weekend.

"Some of the stores are being very aggressive," said Hendrix.

Sears and JCPenney will open at 4 a.m., and the rest of the mall follows at 5 a.m.

Inline stores have the choice of opening that early or waiting until later, but as of Wednesday it appeared as those many had decided to open early in the hopes of attracting some traffic from the heavy advertising and deep discounting at anchor stores.

Hendrix does not release sales figures for the mall, part of Simon Property Group and located at I-94 at State Street, but said that about 30 percent of annual sales will be generated between Black Friday and Dec. 31.

"We're going to expect that to happen again this year," Hendrix said.

She also added that sales at the mall were flat in 2008, despite a troubled year-end for the national and state economy.

"If we mirror last year, we'll be happy," she said.

Last year, only JCPenney opened at 4 a.m. But since another anchor was going to open early this year, and Macy's planned a 5 a.m. opening with 250 morning deals, "we decided we'd open our doors," Hendrix said.

Mall staff was asked by Simon officials if any stores would want to open at midnight, Hendrix said, but there were no takers for that in Ann Arbor.

Meanwhile, the fourth anchor store at Briarwood will open at 9 a.m., after closing at 6 p.m. on Wednesday.

Staff will be coming in Friday to do some new markdowns so that customers find new items on clearance racks, but the doorbuster deal isn't a part of the Von Maur strategy.

"Because we’re not one of those stores that opens for early morning sales and does all of the promotions, customers come in and shop with us as usual," said chainwide marketing manager Amy Davis.