Dick's Thanksgiving miracle

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.

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.

• 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

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

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