Discount Malls Offer Deals We Can Count On : From Florida to Los Angeles, the newest trend is to save money while we spend.

DALE CITY, Va. —  Despite the depressed economy in the blue-collar steel-mill town of Youngstown, Ohio, the George KU charter company is having no problem packing its motor coaches with weekend vacationers.

On most Fridays after work, all 10 of the company’s coaches growl east through the night. Destination: bargains. Bargains on anything from a designer blouse to a cement bird feeder.

Here, about a 30-minute drive south of Washington, D.C. on Interstate 95, a corridor studded from Maine to Florida with discount shopping centers, sprawls Potomac Mills, the mother of all discount malls.

By some counts Virginia’s No. 1 tourist attraction, Potomac Mills is not the enchanted kingdom. This is hard-core consumerism in all its elbow-to-elbow, foot-pounding, hanger-clacking, bin-digging, fluorescent-lit glory.

Nearly 3,000 charter buses a year--80% of which name Potomac Mills as their sole destination--pull in here alongside cars bearing license plates from California to Canada.

The river of humanity coursing through the half-mile-long (and growing) mall is dotted with fezes, turbans and all-American billed caps. Americans travel for hundreds of miles to do their Christmas shopping at the February sales here, and international travelers come to take advantage of the weak dollar.

Youngstown beauty shop owner Cheryl Balciar has been coming on charter tours to Potomac Mills and to the Williamsburg Pottery discount mall, 100 miles south, twice a year for seven years. She has yet to see historic Williamsburg or Mt. Vernon, both just miles from each mall.

Balciar usually comes in a group of 80 people she has organized to fill two buses at $95 per seat, including a night in a hotel. “It started out as a group of women who got tired of watching football games saying, ‘We need a weekend for ourselves,’ ” she says.

But in uncertain economic times, the bargains--and the entertaining hunt for them--became a mainstay in their budgets, says Balciar, whose husband’s layoff from his General Electric light-bulb factory job before Christmas was another reason to stay on the bargain-hunting trail.

This is a serious business for Balciar’s group. It is not unusual for her weekend charters to bring home $20,000 in goods per bus. The record shopping tally for a 44-seat George KU bus, says Norma White, the company’s tour director, was $69,000 on a pre-Christmas jaunt.

Buses on return trips are filled to the roof with bargain booty. Serious shoppers carry rolls of heavy-duty tape to secure goods such as baskets, shopping bags, dried flowers and appliances, to every inch of ceiling space. Even the bus lavatory is filled with tall, standing items such as lamps and concrete lawn ornaments.

“I’ve been in business 25 years and there have always been shopping tours. But the demand and popularity has never been like it is now, with the outlet-mall concept of clustering discount stores in one area,” says John Stachnik, president of the National Tour Assn. and owner of Mayflower Tours in Downers Grove, Ill.

“Everyone enjoys the hunt,” he says, noting that shopping tours cater to everyone from millionaires looking to haggle for antiques, to young couples looking for bargains, to retirees looking for entertainment.

Stachnik’s company, for example, already has 1,000 advance bookings sold for trips to the Mall of America, a mammoth complex of 400 stores, theme park and nightclubs opening near Minneapolis in August.

“These are not tours for the faint of heart,” says Stachnik. “Everyone enjoys seeing monuments and oceans. But, boy, when they see that outlet sign, it’s like the Oklahoma land rush when they fired the gun.”

Retail industry experts use words such as “exciting” and “entertaining” to describe the “Mills concept,” pioneered by Washington developer Herbert Miller.

His Potomac Mills, built in 1985, is described by colleagues as the prototype that set the discount-mall business on fire. Potomac Mills was the first development to put a large number of discount and off-price stores together with the amenities of a regular enclosed mall, marketed to pull shoppers in for whole days at a time from up to 100 miles away--four times the distance the usual mall draws.

It worked. Statistics show the average shopper spends twice the money and time that he or she would in a regular retail mall, explains Lynne C. Mitchell, Potomac Mills’ marketing director.

An upscale retail mall averages $215-$220 of sales per square foot annually, while Potomac Mills averages $280, according to Miller. The reason, he says, is that people who come here are “focused” shoppers, with a definite mission. The further the shopper travels, the more likely to spend money, he says.

“In the past 10 years, the No. 1 reason people shop is price and selection. Fifteen years ago, price was in the middle” of a list of reasons, Miller says. “You can see what’s happened (in the economy). So we put in one place the largest critical mass of value and selection. Our stores are almost twice the size of a typical mall.”

Miller’s “value shopping area” concept is booming in three other Mills projects: Sawgrass Mills, near Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.; Gurnee Mills, near Chicago, and Franklin Mills, near Philadelphia. Another Mills is being built in Ontario, in San Bernardino County, and will probably open in 1993. Stores in these malls run the gamut from Laura Ashley and Calvin Klein to discounters like Everything’s a Dollar (where every item is a dollar).

So, are the bargains worth a long trip?

“To these shop-till-you-drop groups, there’s as much to the entertainment and pleasure of the hunt as there is to the ‘Oh, I saved so much money’ aspect,” observes Kathy Pelino, director of tours and travel at Potomac Mills. “An $800 Escada blouse for $400 is one man’s value, but certainly not another’s.”

“Here’s an example of a deal,” says Marilyn Klimenko, Cheryl Balciar’s sister-in-law. She holds out a Pittsburgh Steelers T-shirt for 50% off--$8.99.

How does she know she’s getting a deal?

“Personally, I look for ‘clearance’ or ‘50% off’ signs.”

Balciar explains that the people paying to travel this far to shop are “seasoned shoppers” who know a bargain when they see one. One of the “super bargains” she came away with was a $5 blouse she’d seen in Youngstown for $20.

GUIDEBOOK

Discount Mall Shopping

Potomac Mills: 2700 Potomac Mills Circle, Prince William, Va. (about 30 minutes south of Washington, take I-95 south to exit 156, Dale City), (703) 494-8190.

Mall of America: 2051 Killebrew Drive, Suite 500, Bloomington, Minn. 55425, near Minneapolis. Opening in August; (612) 851-3500.

Sawgrass Mills: 12801 W. Sunrise Blvd., Sunrise, Fla. 33323 (about 30 minutes west of Ft. Lauderdale, take I-595 west and exit Flamingo Boulevard, go right (north) about 1 mile); (305) 846-2350.

Gurnee Mills: 6170 W. Grand Ave. Gurnee, Ill. 60031, (about an hour north of Chicago, take I-94 west (heading north) and exit at Route 132 west (Grand Avenue); outside Illinois, (800) YES-SHOP; in Illinois, (708) 263-7500.

Franklin Mills: 1455 Franklin Mills Circle, Philadelphia, Pa. 19154 (about 20 minutes north of the center of Philadelphia, take I-95 north, exit right at Woodhaven Road, about 1 mile to Franklin Mills Boulevard exit); (800) 336-MALL or (215) 632-1500.

Mayflower Tours: 1225 Warren Ave., Downers Grove, Ill. 60515, (800) 323-7604.