Wednesday Nov.27, 2019

Dick's Thanksgiving miracle

_Wondering if they're still going to Dick's now that guns are gone_

Hey Snackers,

You'd think Thanksgiving demand would boost turkey prices. Nope. It doesn't — the opposite happens: Breeders whip up their turkey supplies to line up with your big dinner demand.

Stocks inched up Tuesday on shockingly positive earnings from Best Buy and Dick's. Your Snacks team will (slowly) waddle back into your inbox Friday morning after tomorrow's holiday.

We're thankful for you for reading us every day. And for listening to our Snacks Daily podcast, just awarded the Best Business Podcast for 2019 by Discover Pods. Enjoy your feast.

Disarm

Dick's stock jumps 18% as anti-gun moves may have boosted sales

Dick's is crushing it?... That's the shocking takeaway after Dick's Sporting Goods' sales jumped 6% last quarter. Looks like the CEO's actions following the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, boosted support for the big box chain.

Immediate changes: Increase the gun-buying age to 21. Stop selling assault rifles.
Experimental changes: Maybe we should remove the hunting section completely? Dick's tested that out this spring in 125 stores.

Biking shorts, a soccer ball, and a rifle... Casual browsers of Dick's stores could be surprised to find guns and ammo in aisle 6. At first, removing guns wasn't a clear winner or loser for Dick's bottom line:

It could've hurt sales: Lost gun sales, plus potential boycotts from 2nd Amendment lovers.
Or it could've boosted sales: Fill the hunting section with better-selling products, plus win love from gun control fans.
The result: Customer love > Customer hate. The CEO said that sales at the 125 stores without guns or ammo of any kind "comped positively" with the rest of the chain's stores. Translation: unarmed stores did better than armed ones.

Dick's Sporting Goods is growing?... Just like that, this earnings report helped re-write Dick's narrative for investors. Like Target, Dick's stock has totally outperformed the rest of the stock market, rising 50% so far this year. Despite online shopping and subscription boxes, Dick's is hanging around, and you're going in for sweat-wicking gear.

Reserved

AmEx launches its own restaurant reservation service... fresh after acquiring Resy

2 people. 7:30pm. The table staring at the chef... That kind of service used to require a fancy AmEx concierge. But in 2020, AmEx will launch reservation-booking in its app across 10K restaurants for Platinum and Centurion members. Sound like Resy? It is. AmEx bought the trendy-ish reservation app in May. Resy's app still exists separately, but its tech will also power this initiative.

Keep your butt comfortably seated in AmEx's app... Keeping your loyalty is what drove all of this. Dining is the top request of AmEx concierges, and daily AmEx app usage jumped 35% from last year. So AmEx wants its app to be more of a pampered destination — and its other Resy-like acquisitions lately help that:

Pocket Concierge: A Japanese startup acquired in January to get you reservations at Michelin-starred restaurants with 14-month waitlists and paycheck-consuming prix fixe menus.
Cake: A British startup acquired in 2017 to make it way easier to pay for that meal without the awkward "waiter-we-need-the-check-please" handwave.

We're looking for the right case study here... and we think it's Match. The dating app technically competes with other dating apps. But Match Group owns just about all of them — 45 other dating apps, from Tinder and Hinge to OurTime and Plenty Of Fish. Whether you book a dinner res in AmEx's app or on Resy, you're still swimming in AmEx's ecosystem.

What else we’re Snackin’

Spun: SoulCycle CEO Melanie Whelan steps down after a "mutual agreement" with the board (remember when SoulCycle filed to IPO in 2015, but got off the bike instead?)
Stuffed: Papa John's founder and ex-CEO ate 40 pizzas over 30 days and claims the pies got worse since he left
Un-cockiness: Consumer Confidence shockingly fell for the 4th straight month, but that doesn't mean we're all going to be frugal this holiday season
Out-Zucked: Facebook was reportedly just $10M away from acquiring Fitbit, but was outbid by Google's $2.1B
Desperate: Best Buy stock surges 10% on word it prepped hard for the holidays by opening 175 new convenient pickup locations in NYC and Chicago
Publicly: The New York Stock Exchange is trying to let companies raise money when they go through a Direct Listing

Wednesday

The Fed's "Beige Book" gives us the central bank's take on how the US economy is doing
Earnings from John Deere

ID: 1023061

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Tangential remarks

Nicolai Tangen, the CEO who holds the purse strings of Norway’s $1.6 trillion sovereign wealth fund, thinks that his fellow Europeans don’t quite stack up to US employees when it comes to pure hustle, telling the Financial Times in a recent interview that there is a difference in “the general level of ambition” and that “the Americans just work harder”.

Tangen has clearly been putting his money — or more specifically Norway’s — where his mouth is: the sprawling Norwegian oil fund, now one of the largest investors on the planet, has been pumping more capital into its US holdings in the past decade, while decreasing its investment into European entities.

The troublesome news for our European readers? Tangen might be onto something. According to data from the OECD, American workers are putting in almost 60 hours a year more than the weighted average for OECD nations… a benchmark that workers from countries in the European Union are already ~180 hours shy of.

Europeans ‘less hard-working’ than Americans | FT

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Don't be a sucka

$70B

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Google’s parent company crushed earnings expectations, initiated a cash dividend for the first time, and authorized a fresh $70B in share repurchases for good measure. The market likes it very much.

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No, Apple hasn’t cut its Vision Pro production estimates in half

Quite a few news outlets are reporting that Apple thinks it’s only going to sell 400,000 to 450,000 Vision Pros in 2024, compared a “market consensus” of 700,000 to 800,000. They’re all citing a note from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

Obviously there’s no question that Apple’s $3,500 face computer will have a limited audience and could be a huge flop, but this also doesn’t seem like accurate news.

The issue is that 1) this 400,000 number isn’t new. Back in July of 2023, the Financial Times reported that Apple planned to make fewer than 400,000 units in 2024, reducing its initial projections of 1M units, citing two people close to Apple and, the Chinese contract manufacturer assembling the device. 2) It's unclear who was estimating 700,000-800,000 Vision Pros in the first place, but it appears that it was Ming-Chi Kuo himself?