Weekend Briefing No. 612
Grocery Store Genius -- Big Food’s Existential Crisis -- Wall Street’s AI Replacement Program
Welcome to the weekend.
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Prime Numbers
10 — Holiday shoppers plan to cut spending by 10% this year to an average of $1,595, with retail goods purchases dropping even more sharply (down 14 percent to $902) as consumers trade down, hunt for deals, and reuse past decorations.
25 — Streamlining solar permitting regulations could save Americans $1.2 trillion cumulatively over 25 years by making rooftop solar affordable for 18 million more households, who currently pay a median $28,000 per system compared to just $4,000 in Australia due to bureaucratic red tape.
$135,000,000 — Taylor Swift earned an estimated $135 million in the first week of her album “Life of a Showgirl,” which moved 4 million units (the only modern-era album to surpass 4 million), driven by 38 variants and selling 65% directly through her webstore at retail prices rather than wholesale.
Grocery Store Genius
Paying employees 40-150% above industry wages seems reckless—until you realize it’s the most profitable decision Trader Joe’s ever made. By curating just 4,000 products instead of 50,000, eliminating national brands, and treating every square foot like precious real estate, the company generates over $2,000 in sales per square foot—double Whole Foods and quadruple the industry average. Founder Joe Coulombe spotted a rising demographic of “overeducated and underpaid” consumers in the 1960s who craved worldly, quality products without luxury pricing, and built a store that felt like a treasure hunt rather than a chore. The result is a privately-held empire that’s been profitable every single year since 1976, proving that rejecting everything modern retail holds sacred—advertising, data collection, e-commerce, endless choice—can create America’s most beloved grocery chain. Acquired Briefing (12 minutes)
Big Food’s Existential Crisis
When a food giant demands that every sandwich, wrapper, and promotional poster be delivered for destruction, you’re witnessing panic masquerading as trademark protection. J.M. Smucker’s lawsuit against Trader Joe’s over frozen PB&J sandwiches reveals a seismic shift in grocery store power dynamics—private label brands now capture one in every five dollars spent, up from being dismissed as cheap knockoffs just decades ago. What once carried stigma now carries cachet, especially among younger consumers who view store brands as cool discoveries rather than budget compromises, and inflation has accelerated adoption rates that aren’t reversing. Big food companies are hemorrhaging market share to retailers who can produce better products at lower costs without massive marketing budgets, leaving legacy brands fighting fires on multiple fronts while desperately trying to stay relevant in aisles they once dominated. WSJ (8 minutes)
42x: The ROI of Newsletters
Email delivers $42 for every $1 spent—if you do it right. Most newsletters get lost in the noise. The ones that don’t? They solve problems for readers. They build trust. They tell unique stories in an authentic voice. A few strategic changes can transform your newsletter from something people ignore to one they don’t want to miss. Take the Newsletter Health Check: 10 proven ways to boost open rates, engagement, and ROI. Future Forest (Sponsored)
Wall Street’s AI Replacement Program
OpenAI is paying former Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley bankers $150 per hour to teach AI how to eliminate their own junior colleagues’ jobs. Project Mercury assembles over 100 ex-investment bankers to create financial models for restructurings and IPOs, automating the grueling 100-hour workweeks of Excel modeling and PowerPoint deck modifications that have traditionally been junior banker rites of passage. While this promises relief from burnout, industry experts warn that bypassing manual grunt work prevents young bankers from developing the document analysis skills, attention to detail, and industry knowledge essential for client interactions and career progression. The initiative reflects OpenAI’s desperate search for profitable real-world applications despite its $500 billion valuation, while major firms like Citigroup already deploy AI tools to 140,000 employees—signaling an industry-wide transformation that may produce efficient automation at the cost of hollowing out the traditional apprenticeship model that creates competent senior bankers. Entrepreneur (8 minutes)
Designer Babies Already Exist
Silicon Valley billionaires are already paying up to $50,000 to screen embryos for intelligence, appearance, and personality—despite zero published clinical research proving these tests actually work. Companies like Nucleus Genomics and Herasight claim to predict everything from IQ spreads of 15 points across embryos to propensities for anxiety, left-handedness, and even “moral character,” leveraging algorithms trained on genetic databases that overwhelmingly represent Western European ancestry. The medical community warns this technology moved “too fast with too little evidence,” while geneticists point out the fundamental flaw: polygenic traits result from complex interactions of hundreds of genes plus environment, making predictions from a tiny batch of related embryos statistically meaningless. Yet the real danger isn’t ineffective tests tricking wealthy parents—it’s the resurgence of genetic determinism seeping into policy debates, where traits like intelligence and empathy are framed as fixed at birth rather than shaped by nutrition, education, and opportunity, potentially justifying cuts to social programs while an “evolutionary arms race” among elites quietly reshapes humanity’s genetic future. MIT Technology Review (13 minutes)
Friendship Requires Actual Work
We’ve mistaken social media connections for the hard-earned treasure of true friendship—what Seneca described as admitting someone “with all your heart and soul” after long deliberation. Alain de Botton argues that deep friendship is as significant and rare as romantic love, yet our culture provides zero education in cultivating it while drowning us in narrow romantic models, leaving us unable to distinguish genuine connection from cheap counterfeits. Real friendship isn’t luck or divine inspiration but a learnable skill requiring specific insights: understanding there are different species of friendship for different kinds of loneliness (emotional confidante, thinking partner, counterpoint), committing to absolute sincerity and vulnerable presence, and making the daily choice to walk together in the same direction. The paradox is that those who feel friendship’s absence most acutely may simply be those who refuse to accept the sentimental world’s shallow substitutes, holding out instead for connections that make us “wiser, more sensitive, more able to cope with the complexity of existence”—the kind that outlast spouses and outpace siblings in rescuing the heart. The Marginalian (10 minutes)
Survival Through Sheer Will
Jean Muenchrath made a catastrophic climbing decision—removing her mittens on an icy rock face while wearing a 15kg backpack and rigid ski boots—that sent her tumbling down Mount Whitney with a broken spine, shattered pelvis, internal bleeding, and a gangrenous wound. With no rescue possible, she crawled and collapsed her way through five days of snowstorms, thigh-deep glacial snow, and hidden holes, each step sending pain through her broken body, sustained only by visualizing the Himalayas she’d vowed to see if she survived the night. The physical ordeal was just the beginning: her partner’s insistence on silence about the accident prevented healing for 25 years, while chronic pain eventually confined her to bed for months at a time, making her sometimes wish she hadn’t survived. What ultimately saved her wasn’t medication but mental discipline—turning bedridden months into Buddhist meditation retreats, developing her own exercise routines, and finally returning to the mountain 31 years later to forgive herself for the “bad decision” that caused decades of suffering, realizing she could be proud of accomplishing something nearly impossible rather than drowning in self-hatred. The Guardian (11 minutes)
Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.
Weekend Wisdom
In a lecture at the University of Southern California Business School, I talked about this. A young woman raised her hand: “But how could you afford to pay so much more than your competition?” The answer, of course, is that good people pay by their extra productivity. You can’t afford to have cheap employees. - Joe Coulombe