BEIRUT, Lebanon - Only low prices and familiar brands have lured shoppers to spend their money in a dismal holiday shopping season, retailers across the capital told The Daily Star Friday.

Boutiques and specialty shops reported a drop in sales of at least 50 percent from last year at this time, continuing their suffering since the July-August war with Israel. However, stores with larger showrooms, discount prices and recognizable labels - such as GS, Jack Jones/Vero Moda and Big Star/Tally Weijl - claimed sales have topped those of the 2005 holidays.

"The sales are better than last year," said Elie Hanania at the Big Star/Tally Weijl store in ABC Achrafieh, estimating that revenues were up about 25 percent. "It's perfect. Lebanese people are bored from politics - they shop to free themselves."

Shops experienced a crush of customers in the two or three days before Christmas, but merchants cautioned that this flurry would hardly save December sales, which plummeted with the December 1 beginning of the Downtown Beirut sit-in. In past years, shoppers filled the stores for two or three weeks before Christmas.

And the flood of holiday shoppers was not running up the kinds of tabs typical for the season - they headed for the cheaper goods. At Replay in ABC, where a pair of jeans can cost $330, sales crashed to 20 percent of last year's, said employee Badia Sabra.

"People enter, but no one buys," said Ezz Ithani at the Vagues boutique in Hamra Street. "They look at the prices and they feel afraid of the situation. It's shocking. All the stores in Hamra Street are in shock."

Shops used to high volumes of customer traffic seeking the lowest price have been insulated a bit from the collapse by their business models and the security of the brands they carry. Big Star/Tally Weijl keeps a customer database and made sure clients knew about the deals they could find now. http://www.dailystar.com.lb

"We are lucky compared to the others - it's still the same," said Alaa Aliss at the Hamra outlet of Big Star/Tally Weijl.

Stores throughout the city slashed prices before Christmas this year, instead of waiting until after the holidays to launch sales, as is retail custom around the world. Despite the incentives, high-end boutiques have remained empty - almost no holiday tourists have come to Lebanon, and domestic clients have fled to the discount stores. Clerks at Beirut's boutiques even refused to believe that any retailer could be racking up the same sales as last year.

"There's no way to say it's the same," said Fouad Naim

at the Antonio Bladan boutique in Hamra. "We have special customers."

Those customers include the annual swarm of Gulf tourists that descends on Lebanon for the holidays, but this year the hotels stand vacant. Customers also used to consist of Lebanese expatriates who return for the holidays, but many of them have decided to skip their visit this year, said Jean Mansour of the Houdoum men's boutique in the ABC mall. Lastly, many wealthy Lebanese - and important spenders - fled the country during the war and have not returned; one study estimates that about 100,000 highly skilled Lebanese left and stayed away.

"The people who have money, they left the country," Mansour told The Daily Star. "People now are not spending as they used to spend for Christmas and New Year's Eve. Now they come just to buy small gifts. Everybody now is afraid." -Daily Star