The nation's stores finally got some relief this Thanksgiving weekend, according to data released late Monday, but the sales gains were modest and analysts worry the pace can't be sustained through the season and beyond as shoppers worry about the recession.

Adding more pressure is that a later Thanksgiving this year means a shorter buying season between that holiday and Christmas, and thus less time to make crucial sales.

"Consumers were very deliberate about where they went and what they shopped for" over the Thanksgiving weekend, said Bill Martin,co-founder of ShopperTrak RCT Corp. a research firm that tracks traffic and retail sales at more than 50,000 outlets. "They shopped for promotions, and there wasn't a lot of impulse buying."

The question, he said, is whether consumers still have "some more ammo left" to keep shopping, and how aggressive stores need to promote their deals to bring them back.

Total retail sales for Friday and Saturday combined rose 1.9 percent compared with the same holiday time period a year ago, ShopperTrak reported, but a shopping frenzy on Friday wasn't sustained the next day.

Sales rose 3 percent on Friday to $10.6 billion, but slipped 0.8 percent to $6.0 billion on Saturday. Martin expected a further pullback Sunday, estimating that total retail sales for the three-day weekend probably rose a modest 1 percent.

The final sales figure for the three-day weekend will be released Wednesday.

Since the financial meltdown intensified this fall, retailers have been grappling with the most severe dropoff in spending in decades as shoppers worry about layoffs, shrinking retirement funds and tightening credit.

Total U.S. foot traffic for Black Friday — so named because it historically was when a surge of sales pushed stores into profitability — dropped 18 percent as shoppers visited fewer stores, ShopperTrak said.

Meanwhile, preliminary data by SpendingPulse, a data service provided by MasterCard Advisors that estimates U.S. retail sales across all payment forms including cash and check, show that sales at specialty apparel for Friday and Saturday combined rose 1.6 percent, while luxury sales rose 2.4 percent. Online sales soared 11.8 percent. Electronics sales fell 14.3 percent, though that was an improvement from the 22.1 percent they dropped in the first two weeks of November.

For the first two weeks of November, luxury and apparel suffered a 19 percent drop and 21.1 percent decline respectively compared with the same period a year ago.

"We saw significant improvement" over Friday and Saturday, said Michael McNamara, vice president at SpendingPulse. "November sales activity was so different from the last part of the month." But he noted that business was fueled by "amazing discounts."

Sales for the month of November will be provided by SpendingPulse later this week.