Starbucks is getting sued over a "sugar-free" protein matcha with 16g of sugar. They say it's all from the milk. A Reese's cup has 11. Customer's job to read the label, or should sugar-free mean zero?

True Food Kitchen filed Chapter 11 with about $1.6M in unrestricted cash. Roughly two weeks of runway. Nobody gets to two weeks overnight. How many weeks of cash can you see on your own books right now?

Uber is buying ezCater for $2.3B. That's catering for 140,000+ restaurants. Delivery took a cut of the dinner order. Now it wants the office lunch. Is this more catering orders for restaurants, or a new fee on the ones you already had?

Restaurants added 10,800 jobs in September. A third of August, and August's first print got cut almost in half. A slower headline is not a cheaper crew. Don't budget next year's raise off BLS. Budget it off the rate you actually paid.

Chick-fil-A's CEO told CNBC they will never open on Sundays, and they won't put an AI voice in the drive-thru. Hospitality stays person to person. About 3,000 stores did $23.9 billion last year. Third in the country. Still dark one day a week. Is the closed Sunday the brand, or a day of sales they're choosing to leave?

Chip City is closing its remaining shops. 45 locations by 2024. Over $35M in system sales last year. The raise bought doors. It did not buy traffic. If the guest is spending less, the next opening is a countdown.

Burger King is selling ~200 company stores this year and prioritizing franchisees who live near them — not PE rollups. Local skin beats remote capital. If the owner never eats there, the store feels it. Would you rather own 12 you walk into every week, or 100 you only see on a dashboard?

Theory food looked fine. Actual was +3 pts. The gap wasn't theft. It was comps, a stale cost sheet, and LTOs living in misc. Theory is a plan. Actual is the week.

McDonald's is looking at an $8.5B decade bet on protein and smaller portions for the GLP-1 crowd. Guests are still walking in. They're just skipping the fries and the bread. That's not a traffic problem. That's a check-size problem. Are you redesigning the menu, or just accepting a smaller ticket?

Renewal +40%. Claims flat. Same stores. That line went from ~$45K to ~$65K for a lot of operators. Wage hikes also lift workers’ comp because the premium is a percent of payroll. Underwrite the renewal like labor — not last year’s number plus hope.

Crazy story on that Dubai to Tel Aviv flight. The people who stopped a suspected hijacking deserve to be known, and celebrated, for their bravery. Not a footnote. Names. Let’s celebrate them.

Your week labor % can look fine while Wednesday lunch bleeds you. 3 soft hours × 4 days × $18 ≈ $11k/year on one unit. Chase SPLH by daypart, not the weekly print.

Labor % looked fine. Cash did not. Pull punch detail. Ten minutes early, every shift, on a full crew is tens of thousands a year. Not a schedule problem. A clock problem.

My kids will grow up with a robot in the house the way I grew up with a microwave. AI is moving faster than anything I've seen in business. The next 5 years won't look like the last 20. Robots at home. Flying cars. Their normal will be our science fiction.

A 1.35 factor sounds like 35%. Paid back in daily draws over 6 months, it's north of 120% annualized. The advance doesn't close the cash gap. It moves it to next week and makes it bigger.

Everyone’s in New York talking politics this week. Meanwhile the national debt sits at $40 trillion. Plus $2.67 trillion in one year. Roughly $85k a second. Politicians aren’t stopping. They’re competing to spend faster. Hard assets aren’t a vibe trade when the Treasury is the printer. Gold, bitcoin, anything that can’t be voted into existence — that’s the hedge for a balance sheet that never shrinks.

Wage step. “No layoffs.” Scheduled hours still dropped double digits. Headcount is the press line. Hours × rate is the P&L.

I'm paying roughly double for the same order through a third-party app. Guest already ate the markup. Franchisee can't walk — delivery dollars are baked into the week. Cities squeeze the platforms on courier pay. So who "pays" the settlement? Everyone. The only open question is who gets to pretend they didn't.

Delivery at 28% of sales. ~25% platform take. Royalties still on the gross ticket. That isn't four-wall growth. It's a different product line with a worse contribution. Underwrite the channel — not the AUV line.

McD drops an $8.5B “partnering” package. Franchisees still write the remodel check. Corp chips in rent relief + capital so the math pencils in ~4 years. That’s not free CapEx. That’s co-funding a mandate. If you can’t name your share before the remodel calendar hits, you’re not negotiating — you’re absorbing.