Image by Flickr user Peter KaminskiImage by 20081130-sale.jpg

Preliminary numbers are showing that American's actually spent 3 percent more this Black Friday than last, topping some $10.6 billion at more than 50,000 retail outlets.

Pretty incredible when you consider all the doom-and-gloom news stories leading up to the big shopping day. I haven't seen any hard numbers yet for the Charleston area, but it's reasonable to assume they reflect national numbers.