Black Friday is always a day ripe for hype and wide-though predictable-television coverage.  But the last two Black Fridays seem to have attracted even more speculation, and anxiety, than usual. So it is impossible to resist looking at some of the numbers that are coming through today.  The takeaway seems to be that there were more people shopping this Black Friday than last year, but they spent less.  So the overall take by retailers was higher, but not by much.  Andrea Chang shares some of the key stats in today's LA Times:

Sales on the day after Thanksgiving rose just 0.5% to $10.66 billion, according to ShopperTrak RCT Corp., a research firm that monitors sales at more than 50,000 stores. That compared with a 3% year-over-year Black Friday increase in 2008 and an 8.3% surge in 2007. 

"It's a positive sign that we had an increase in sales, but the numbers certainly don't indicate that those will be sustained," said Britt Beemer, chairman of consumer behavior firm America's Research Group. 

Nationwide, 195 million shoppers visited stores and websites over the four-day weekend, up from 172 million last year, the National Retail Federation said Sunday. 
But average spending fell 7.9%, to $343.31 per person, from $372.57 a year ago. Total spending reached an estimated $41.2 billion.

The resistance to making big purchases is no surprise to the folks at The Big Picture, where, before any Friday stats came out, David Rosenberg shared the below chart and stressed that consumer frugality is alive and well:

Rosenberg writes:

The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index may have improved (48.7 in October to 49.5 in November) and beaten consensus expectations, but it remains firmly in recession terrain. It is so obvious that consumers are tired of the over-borrowing and over-spending days of yesteryear. Despite all the temptations provided by the government, auto buying plans dropped to an eight-month low (from 4.7 in October to 4.4 in November); home buying plans slipped to a new 27-year low of 2.3 (from 2.5 in October and 3.0 in September); and intentions to buy a major appliance stayed at a 14-year low (23.2).

Read Consumer Confidence in the Doldrums here.