Red Friday?

Don’t get your hopes up. Manzi:

There was a lot of positive reaction to the fact that Black Friday retail sales in the U.S. were up about 3% vs. last year. Many observers thought this indicated we might dodge a bullet again this Christmas shopping season. The biggest problem with this, of course, is that we don’t know how much discounting had to be done to generate this sales growth. Anecdotal reports are that it was massive, and sufficient to reduce total profit even after the increase in unit sales.