If you're still stubbornly holding out hope that "Black Friday" will confound all forecasts and turn out to be a surprise success, we humbly submit that it may be time to surrender instead to the inevitability of “Bleak Friday.”

A slew of numbers out today confirm that rather than beginning to get into the buying spirit, consumers are only further paring back their spending as the holidays approach.

The U.S. Department of Commerce announced today that consumer spending fell by 1 percent in October compared with the month earlier—the sharpest decrease since a 1.2 percent drop in September 2001. The decline builds on a growing downward trend in personal consumption, with spending decreasing 0.3 percent in September, 0.1 percent in August, and 0.1 percent in July.

Consumer spending makes up 70 percent of G.D.P., so those figures go a long way toward explaining the nation's overall economic contraction.

Spending is down in part because Americans have grown anxious about their jobs and are hording their cash. Personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income was 2.4 percent in October, up from 1 percent in September and considerably higher than it's been in the last several years.

But back to the bad news. Also today, Tiffany & Co. lowered its full-year earnings outlook, announced it plans to trim staff, and reported a 57 percent decline in fiscal third-quarter net income.

Despite strength oversees, net sales fell 1.4 percent due to U.S. same-store sales plunging 14 percent.

The final November reading of the Consumer Sentiment Index came out today as well. The verdict? The University of Michigan's leading indicator fell to a 28-year low in November, dipping to 55.3 from October's 57.6. That gloomy reading shouldn't be a big surprise, as last week Deloitte announced that its consumer-spending index had turned negative for the first time ever in October.

Oh yeah, and about "Cyber Monday"—ComScore said today that consumer Web spending dropped 4 percent so far in November versus the same period last year, the first time e-commerce figures have shown a year-to-year drop.

That's a fairly drastic figure considering that during the first 10 months of 2008, Web retailers took in 9 percent more than in the same period of 2007.

All this adds up to Black Friday, retail's holy day of obligation, looking darker and darker.