Merchants had something to cheer about and enough to worry about as Americans hit the stores over the long holiday weekend.

Deep discounts and warm weather over the four-day Thanksgiving Day break brought people into the stores as U.S. consumers spent an average of $360.15 each from Nov. 23 through Sunday, up from $302.81 a year earlier, according to the National Retail Federation, while ComScore Networks, which tracks Internet spending, reported Sunday that online sales, excluding travel, auctions and corporate purchases, rose 42 percent to $434 million on the day after Thanksgiving.

ComScore expected spending yesterday on the Web to hit $600 million.

“I went into the season conservative,” said Mandy Soderi, owner of Studio Six, a gift shop on Thames Street in Bristol. “I beat last year [sales] two weeks ago.”

Good prices and good weather helped drive consumers into stores or onto Web but not all retailers benefited. Much of the buying appeared to be for deeply discounted goods on which stores make little or no money.

“The retailers made their own bed here,” Patricia Edwards, a Seattle-based money manager, told Bloomberg News. “It’s almost this mentality, ‘Don’t worry if you’re losing money on every transaction, because you’ll make it up on volume.’ ”

Such pricing deals fade as the season wears on, leaving some to wonder whether the shopping season will end strongly.

Ross Tague just wants it to snow.

“It’s killing me,” said the manager of Northwind Sports, a snowboard shop in Bristol. “We call it the backyard syndrome. If they don’t have snow in their backyard, they say, ‘Why am I going to buy a snowboard?’ ”

Many of the people out shopping over the weekend headed for the malls, he surmised.

The weekend was uneven at Imagine, a gift shop along North Main Street in Warren.

The day after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday in the retail trade, was “flat” at Imagine, said Gene Oberhauser, the store’s co-owner. So was Saturday.

But Sunday was “surprisingly, extremely strong,” he said. “Isn’t that odd?”

That was in contrast the national retailers who saw sales slow as the weekend progressed.

Stores and malls that opened as early as midnight Friday drew a bigger-than-expected turnout, including Wrentham Village Premium Outlets in Wrentham, Mass.

Some people headed for the outdoor shopping center’s first midnight opening turned away after spending hours stuck in traffic outside the mall. Store managers at the Coach, KB Toys, Timberland and Ugg stores all said sales far exceeded their expectations for the night.

Business around the country slowed as the weekend wore on, according to news reports.

The season will work out fine, Oberhauser said.

Most retailers “are eternally optimistic,” he said. “I think [sales] will hit plus-eight or 10 percent,” said the Bristol shop owner.