Black Friday: A small step for bricks-and-mortar, a giant leap for online

How was Black Friday for retailers? It depends on who's counting.

ShopperTrack, which tracks store sales, reports that spending on the day after Thanksgiving was up 0.5% to $10.66 billion. The distribution of the improvement around the country was mixed, and some regions did poorly. In the West, sales rose 4.7%, but in the Northeast they were down 4.9%.