Local retailers are anticipating the biggest sales day of the year today as last-minute shoppers scramble to wrap up their Christmas gift lists.

“Generally, the Saturday right before Christmas normally is your largest-volume day,” said David Cianelli, general manager at Pearlridge Center. “It’s going very well. It seems to be up quite a bit from 2017. We kind of expected it with the low unemployment rate, strong economy locally and because we’ve added a number of new tenants in the Downtown section of the center that have created a lot of excitement.”

National stores such as Macy’s, Sephora and Pandora, as well as local stores including Homegrown, are seeing strong holiday traffic, so much so that Pearlridge is expecting to surpass the industrywide estimate of a more than 4 percent spike in sales this season, he said.

The center brought on additional workers today, including extra security and housekeeping staff, in anticipation of heavy crowds.

“We’re very certain that total holiday sales for 2018 will exceed the 2017 numbers,” Cianelli said. “There’s just a real good tail wind, if you will, at Pearlridge Center. We’re just really peaking at the right time.”

Nicole Vazquez, a manager at Sephora at Ala Moana Center, expects today’s sales to be among the biggest for the national cosmetics chain, which is more than doubling staff today to 65 from 30 employees. It is also anticipating to double its sales volume, even though more consumers seem to be shopping online this year, she said.

“It’s a different Christmas for us. For the season it’s not as large as we anticipated,” though foot traffic is up by about 4 percent, she said. “We have a lot more shoppers. They’re just a lot more savvy this year. They’re competitive shopping.”

Kailua resident Kahea O’Brien was trying to complete her shopping list at Ala Moana on Friday night so she wouldn’t have to shop today.

“I’m hoping to get it all done,” she said. “Everything came so fast. Christmas just came. It was just here and now it’s here again.”

Joanne Wong of Kakaako did most of her shopping online to try to avoid the crowded malls this weekend.

“Mostly I did it online ’cause the traffic is crazy,” she said.

Her friend Malia Drago, however, decided to improvise.

“I have not started my Christmas shopping. I’m doing it all last-minute,” she said while shopping Friday at Ala Moana. “I’m gonna hit all the stores and figure it out.”

The popular local retailer Hawaii’s Finest, which sells T-shirts, aloha and street wear in Kakaako, is expecting 1,000 people to come through the store today. That doesn’t compare to the roughly 3,000 who came on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, but will help push sales over the top this holiday season, said Sua Tuala, events coordinator for the retailer, which also promotes concerts.

“This whole week actually has been super busy. A lot of our back stock is pretty much already gone,” he said, adding that holiday sales are up by 300 percent. “Sales-wise it is substantial.”

The National Retail Federation is projecting 2018 holiday sales to rise between 4.3 and 4.8 percent over last year to between $717.45 billion and $720.89 billion. That compares with an average increase of 3.9 percent annually over the past five years.