Nearly 500 people lined up outside a Kennesaw Circuit City in bitingly cold pre-dawn darkness Friday to get a jump on holiday shopping, and similar scenes played out at other metro Atlanta malls and big-box stores.

But the big question is whether such enthusiasm will continue into the heart of the holiday season.

Even as bargain-hunters in Atlanta and elsewhere flocked to after-Thanksgiving sales, retailers braced for their slowest Christmas rush in five years as consumers battle higher fuel and food costs amid the housing slump and a choppy stock market.

Friday's local shopping scene offered a mixed bag of indicators.

Early crowds were thick but manageable Friday morning at Lenox Square, the shopaholics mecca in Buckhead that's known as one of the nation's busiest malls. Store employees at some boutique shops said they expected a bigger opening rush, although business picked up at midmorning.

Most of the action seemed to come in the wee hours as shoppers lined up for "door-buster" deals -- a tactic that has mushroomed in recent years. At the Kennesaw Circuit City, shoppers queued up at 4:30 a.m. in a line that stretched into a rear parking lot.

Shawn Brown, a 35-year-old steelworker from Cartersville, said he got in line at 7 p.m. Thursday, cutting his Thanksgiving holiday short for a chance at a $299 Compaq laptop.

Over at Gwinnett Place Mall, Duluth resident Lynda Ashby started her spree at 5 a.m.

"Some people like to get up early to go hunting," Ashby said. "This is my version of hunting. I'm hunting for deals, and I'm finding them."

At Northlake Mall in DeKalb County, Nanette Baskin was less enthused, having been pulled into the mall fray by a 13-year-old daughter who has just developed the shopping bug, she said.

Baskin, who noted that the stores didn't seem too crowded during her three-hour trip at Northlake, said the family is trying not to spend as much this year as in the past.

Some retail analysts say an uncertain economy will cause more consumers, especially in the middle- and lower-income brackets, to pull back on spending this year. That's causing widespread concern among department stores, big-box chains and electronics retailers, which count on the holiday season for 20 percent or more of the year's revenue.

In response, Wal-Mart, Toys "R" Us and others started discounting and door-buster specials weeks ago in an effort to generate traffic.

"We ran more deals before Thanksgiving than in previous years," said Marshall Bronson, general manager of the Best Buy off Edgewood Avenue in Atlanta. "It probably steals a little thunder [from the day after Thanksgiving], but everything gets so compressed on Black Friday that you just can't do it all on one day."

Although electronics -- especially LCD TVs, GPS navigation devices and MP3 players -- are expected to be top sellers this year, analysts say there aren't enough "must-have" items this year to inspire consumers to splurge.

And toy sales may take a hit due to concerns over the rash of recalls affecting Chinese-made goods.

At the same time, the rising dominance of gift cards has taken some of the emphasis off door-buster promotions, as has a shift toward online shopping.

Consumers, on average, will do 30.2 percent of their holiday shopping on Web sites, up from 28.9 percent last year, according to the National Retail Federation, a trade group.

Total retail holiday sales are expected to increase 4 percent this year to reach $474.5 billion, according to the retail trade group. That would be down from 4.6 percent growth last year and the smallest annual gain since 2002, according to the National Retail Federation.

Black Friday, named as such for the profits it traditionally produced, is not the biggest revenue-generating day of the holiday season, but it is considered an important kickoff to the consumer spending psyche.

Next up is "Cyber Monday," when many online retailers will unleash Web site promotions, hoping to cash in on consumers who are back on the office computers, shopping at work.

In the meantime, some consumers in metro Atlanta said they were more than willing to spend money on Friday -- just not at stores.

Andrea Wine of Alpharetta went with sister Lisa O'Neal to Natural Body Spa across from North Point Mall. Both had spent the past two days cooking, and this was a reward of sorts.

"You see the mall, and you don't want to go in it," Wine said. "What are they going to get today that they can't get on other days?"

-- Staff writers Laura Diamond, Marcus Garner and Mike Morris contributed to this article.