Unfortunately, preliminary Black Friday reports contain almost no useful information about the state of the economy. The first round of stories — the ones on Thursday evening or Friday — are driven almost entirely by anecdote: How many people showed up at the mall where a TV crew happened to set up its cameras? How long do the lines seem to be compared to last year, according to a mall manager with a vested interest in making sales look good? How much was spent by the handful of families willing to talk to journalists on their way back to the car? These stories help fill airtime on what is typically a slow news weekend, but they aren’t good for much else.

The second round of stories, on Sunday evening or Monday morning, at least attempts to move beyond anecdote into real data. But as blogger and investor Barry Ritholtz has argued for years, early Black Friday sales figures are at best unreliable and at worst completely useless for predicting overall holiday sales.

Read the article “Black Friday Sales Numbers Are Useless And Wrong” on fivethirtyeight.com.