The back-to-school shopping season is almost here, and Sandy Deel of Salem has this weekend scheduled as prime-time bargain hunting for her 8-year-old son's tools of education.

Call it a rite of planned penny-pinching. Last year, she stocked up on pencil sharpeners, pencils and notebooks in the first three days of August, and she didn't have to pay sales tax on her purchases.

Now she's eagerly awaiting Virginia's second tax-free holidays on Aug. 3 through 5.

From 12:01 a.m. Friday to midnight Sunday, all school supplies less than $20 and clothing less than $100 are free of the state's 5 percent sales tax. Though the annual holiday targets people shopping for school-age children, there's no requirement that purchases must be for education purposes.

"I saved a lot at Sam's and Wal-Mart," Deel said, recalling her purchases with a grin. She'll celebrate this holiday again.

Across the Roanoke Valley, many retailers are preparing to lure shoppers for this weekend of savings.

Valley View Mall will extend its opening and closing hours. Some anchor stores at Tanglewood Mall will be open earlier in the mornings and later in the evenings.

Trey Chadwell, sales support manager at J.C. Penney at Valley View Mall, said the back-to-school shopping time ranks second behind the Christmas season in business at the department store.

But it's unclear how popular this holiday weekend really was in the Roanoke Valley and statewide last year, its first year in existence. There are no sales performance or savings figures available from the Virginia Department of Taxation, said Joel Davison, a spokesman for the department. He said the retailers do not break out sales figures for this specific weekend. They only report monthly results.

Still, the department estimates that shoppers will save about $3.8 million this year during the tax-free weekend.

How does the state know that? It isn't an exact guess, Davison said.

Last year, the department of taxation estimated that people would save about $3.6 million. And each year through 2011, the state has calculated savings to rise incrementally, Davison said. The results are based on an impact study when the law was first introduced, he said.

Nationally, back-to-school spending could total $18.4 billion this year, with the average family spending $563.49, a 6.9 percent rise from $527.08 last year, according to the National Retail Federation.

To be sure, the tax-free weekend last August wasn't the frenzy that many employees at the Children's Place, a clothing retailer at Valley View, expected. The weekend didn't bring business or sales that were anywhere close to the time period on and surrounding Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving that's traditionally one of the biggest shopping days of the year.

"It wasn't as crazy," said Jackie Hitt, store manager at the Children's Place.

Last August's sales-tax holiday weekend wasn't any different than a normal weekend at Goody's at Tanglewood Mall, said manager Christy Weddle.

The store is hosting a kids fest event next week with games and free items, but it isn't intended to coincide with the tax-free holiday, Weddle said.

It's true that store promotions may appeal to some shoppers more than tax-free savings. There already are sales galore on summer merchandise and fall offerings at some local stores.

The items that are exempt from sales tax could end up drawing customers who might make other purchases. People who end up in a store for clothes may be enticed to buy items that aren't tax-free, such as jewelry.

"The draw of tax-free ... it helps the whole store," said Chadwell at J.C. Penney.

But some retailers, such as Circuit City, plan to make all items in stores tax-free this weekend. These retailers pay the state sales tax themselves.

Circuit City offered this same incentive last August during the tax holiday, though a spokeswoman would not talk specifically about the retailer's sales performance during that weekend in 2006.

The electronics purveyor, which has a location near Valley View Mall, will extend its hours this weekend , and it is beefing up inventory.

"We expect a busy weekend," said Jackie Foreman, spokeswoman for Circuit City, based in Richmond.

Still, the manager of the Valley View J.C. Penney, Brady Haire, said the store hopes to see a slew of shoppers who last year didn't know what the tax holiday meant.

"We'll have some lift this year" in business, he said, adding that children's clothing was the largest draw in 2006.