Leading US retailers are today unleashing a surge of special deals aimed at online shoppers, amid initial indications that their efforts to improve sales in their stores over the busy post-Thanksgiving weekend have delivered sales only slightly ahead of last year.

ShopperTrak, which measures the number of people going into about 50,000 stores, estimated that shoppers spent $10.7bn on the day after Thanksgiving, only 0.5 per cent up from last year. In 2008, ShopperTrak estimated that post-Thanksgiving Friday sales rose 3 per cent, although seasonal sales overall last year slumped.

JC Penney, however, which has more than 1,000 lower-cost department stores aimed at the quintessentially middle-American shopper, said its Friday sales had been “strong across all areas of the country”.