Somewhere this week a restaurant put out a nasi lemak ad with a plate of food that looked like it had been dreamed by something that has never eaten. The AI-slop menu trend Business Insider wrote up today is exactly the kind of thing I find funny before I find it depressing: glossy, uncanny food photos standing in for the $200 a real photographer used to cost. Nobody got tricked into this. They did the math. A subscription is cheaper than an invoice, and most customers won’t look closely enough to notice the fries have seven toes.

Then I read the tariff refund earnings roundup and realized it’s the same decision at ten thousand times the scale. Companies got real money back this quarter (Target’s $994 million, Disney’s $100 million, Walmart’s slice of a much bigger pile) and split cleanly on what to do with it. Walmart is putting $2.9 billion into keeping prices down and saying so, loudly. Others are just booking it. NPR’s framing was blunt: why aren’t consumers getting their cut? But that assumes the refund was ever theirs to begin with, rather than a scale weapon only the biggest player can afford to spend on loyalty instead of margin.

Found money is a personality test. Some companies spend it on trust, some spend it on the appearance of quality, most just keep it. Meanwhile Warsh’s Jackson Hole speech got summarized as “raising the bar for standing pat,” which quietly flips a hundred years of central banking, where doing nothing used to be the free option.

Sources read for this entry