With nine days left before the busiest shopping day for most retailers nationwide, the city’s largest retail outlet, Pemberton Square, plans an early opening and at least one incentive to visit when shoppers begin their holiday bargain-hunting next Friday.

In the past two years, 10 businesses have closed for reasons largely related to increasing rents and sparse foot traffic in the mall itself. That figure grew last month when Baskin Robbins Ice Cream decided to close its drive-through operation at Pemberton Plaza, also owned by the mall’s parent company, CBL & Associates Inc.

At Pemberton Square, however, tenants are doing business in just 24 of the mall’s 45 available spaces.

To combat the numbers, the mall ownership has a plan.

&#8220The bigger stores will open at 5 a.m., and the smaller stores in the mall will open at 7 a.m.,” general manager Renee Williams said, adding the mall’s bigger tenants, Belk, JC Penney, Dillards and Hudson, will decide this week which will open first on a day when retailers have historically begun their most profitable season.

It even has a name, Black Friday, believed to have derived in part from the practice of recording profits in black and financial losses in red.

Mall shoppers will receive a free gift when they purchase items from any of Pemberton’s smaller stores, Williams said.

Aside from organizing opening times and hoping for relatively cool weather – to put people &#8220in the mood for Christmas,” Williams said – the mall hopes for a successful holiday shopping season to end 2006 on an upbeat note.

Baskin Robbins’ operators Donald and Norma Piazza said at the time that repeated attempts to purchase their strip of property from CBL in the decade the couple sold ice cream there never materialized because of a steep asking price.

Attempts to attract businesses to fill some of the office space gone dark during that time have continued, Williams has said, resulting in this month’s opening of a Wingo’s Wings Burgers and Subs location near the mall’s center.

&#8220We’re working on getting some new things,” Williams said.

In its 2005 report detailing its financial status to its stockholders, the company touts a 94.7 percent occupancy rate in its 132 malls and associated properties that it owns or manages in 27 states.

Much of that occupancy at the Tennessee-based company’s holdings across the country can be attributed to 20 new properties the company acquired in 2004 and 2005, a $1 billion expansion of the CBL footprint. Much of it reflected its desire to grow beyond its Southeastern base, as all but three are outside the South.

Additionally, CBL has developed seven new shopping centers, with one of them, the Southaven Towne Center in DeSoto County, 100 percent leased before the doors opened, according to the report.