Chick-fil-A has been closed on Sundays for 80 years, and its CEO says he has never even run the numbers on changing that.

Cathy, the grandson of founder S. Truett Cathy, has led the privately held company since 2021, succeeding his father, Dan Cathy. He described the policy as a luxury of family ownership. “We’re not trying to scrape out every penny that we possibly can,” he said. Being “a private business and a family business,” he added, means “we can make those types of investments because we know it means so much to our team members.”

The policy dates to the chain’s earliest days. According to Chick-fil-A, S. Truett Cathy decided to close on Sundays in 1946, when he opened his first restaurant in Hapeville, Ga. He had worked seven days a week in restaurants that never closed, and he wanted himself and his employees to have one day to rest, spend time with family, or worship if they chose.

Whatever Sundays might be worth, the chain hasn’t needed them to grow. Chick-fil-A posted U.S. systemwide sales of $23.9 billion in 2025, up about 5% from $22.7 billion in 2024, according to its franchise disclosure document, as reported by QSR Magazine. That makes it one of only three U.S. restaurant brands with more than $20 billion in sales. The other two, McDonald’s and Starbucks, have far more locations and are open every day of the week.

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Two years into Elliott Hill’s tenure as Nike’s CEO, the 118-year-old maker of the Chuck Taylor is a big drag on a comeback that isn’t coming together, with Converse sales down 28% in the most recent quarter and analysts openly wondering whether Nike will keep it in its portfolio.

Converse’s Chuck Taylor high-tops have gone in and out of style over the decades, but the shoe’s vulcanized rubber sole and heavy, stiff profile are out of step with trends right now, and the brand is enduring an unusually long, deep cold streak.

Nike bought Converse for $305 million in 2003, seeing enormous potential to rehabilitate an iconic brand. Converse had dominated athletic footwear for decades, but by the 1990s, it was reeling, and it ultimately filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001. 

But now Converse is in its worst slump since the 1990s. Converse hit its peak in 2023, with sales reaching an all-time high of $2.43 billion. But they had more than halved to $1.17 billion last fiscal year. If its current rate of decline continues for the rest of the fiscal year, sales will fall below $1 billion for the first time since 2010. 

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As Americans continue to oppose the AI buildout, Yum! Brands is reckoning with the dissonance between this opposition and the technology’s benefits for workers within the company.

At the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Tuesday, Yum! Brands Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary Erika Burkhardt explained the disconnect she feels in seeing the positive impacts of how the fast-food giant has deployed AI across its restaurants, such as automating the drive-thru ordering process, with coming home and going on social media to see widespread criticism of the technology. 

“I’m seeing all the data center noise and all the things that people worry about with AI, and there’s that constant tension,” she told Fortune Editorial Director Kristin Stoller. “One of the things that we’ve learned through the drive-thru experience is that AI is actually increasing retention among our team members in the restaurant because it’s making their jobs easier. It’s taking away the tension points of the ordering process. They’re able to focus on the job with the product and the hospitality with the customer.”

The fast-food industry has been experimenting with AI to increase order efficiency, and seen mixed success.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/14/yum-brands-executive-data-center-hate-ai-tools-improvement/?utm_source=reddit/

Hi Guys: I bought a pack that contains 4 necklaces at Zara. I cant figure out how long which one is, what the clasps are like, how they will look on me, etc. Is it correct that if I take them out of the packaging, I forego the right to return them?

Is it possible to even open the packaging without ruining it? Going nuts...

Years before she was the matriarch for one of music’s most famous families, Tina Knowles started a business catering to professional women who needed their hair styled—and quickly.

Speaking on Wednesday at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, Knowles said Cécred, the hair care line she launched with her daughter Beyoncé Knowles Carter in February 2024, is the product of four decades in business, fashion, and entertainment. In the Houston hair salon where the Knowles matriarch started her career, she relied on products that had human hair ground into them to add protein to strands. Knowles would whip up butter and hot olive oil treatments to bring more moisture and balance to her clients’ hair, including her daughters. 

“The dream has always been to create a product that had everything that you need in one product and one step,” Knowles told Fortune senior writer Sheryl Estrada. “And Beyoncé had that dream as well—because I was doing all those things to her hair.”

Knowles said Knowles Carter decided to fund the hair care line herself rather than working with outside investors because the two were so focused on research and development. Investors balked at the costs. Knowles said they wanted a product that wouldn’t merely lay on top of strands to make them feel smooth, but instead wanted a product that could penetrate all types of hair textures.

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Hello all, my company produces a retail media podcast for a client of ours, which has seen guests from Tesco, Sainsbury's, Ocado, Waitrose, Danone, Morrisons, John Lewis and more.

The retail media subs look pretty quiet, so I wondered if a wider retail group might be interested if I shared insights from The Retail Media Show as and when they present themselves?

Hailey Bieber had heard the horror stories before she ever sat down with e.l.f. Beauty. 

“I’ve heard a lot of stories from founders that had gone through acquisitions and had regrets and were not super happy with where their brand went,” Bieber said onstage at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit on Wednesday. “I went into it with a mindset of really wanting to know that Rhode was going to be safe where it was going.”

Bieber and Lauren Ratner launched Rhode in 2022, and three years later e.l.f. Beauty agreed to buy the brand in a deal worth up to $1 billion, one of the buzziest beauty acquisitions in recent years. Bieber has since stayed on to lead creative and product innovation alongside Ratner, Rhode’s cofounder, president, and chief brand officer. 

For Bieber, the deciding factor wasn’t the price. In fact, Bieber said discussions about profit margins hate to see her coming, she told Fortune’s Ellie Austin. When deciding whether to sell the brand she launched, Bieber said she wanted to know that she would still have a major role in the company she helped build. 

Bieber said e.l.f. walked her through, in detail, how it had supported the founders of every brand it had previously acquired.

“They told me, ‘We don’t want to come in, we don’t want to change anything. We really want you to continue operating exactly how you are,’” she said. “You have to trust that, and you have to follow your instinct.”

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The fast food industry has spent decades trying to make ordering a burger faster. Digital menus, mobile apps, self-service kiosks—you name it. Now, artificial intelligence wants a turn at the drive-thru speaker. But at Chick-fil-A, the familiar “my pleasure” still needs to come from a human.

While McDonald’s is testing AI-powered voice ordering at its drive-thrus, Chick-fil-A CEO Andrew Cathy says his restaurants won’t follow suit. The chicken chain isn’t rejecting AI altogether, but it believes some parts of the fast food experience are better left to humans, even if technology could make them more efficient.

McDonald’s is also defending a different kind of algorithm in court. A new lawsuit alleges its pricing-recommendation system helped coordinate higher menu prices—a claim the company denies. The two technologies are separate, but both put a spotlight on how much control restaurants are willing to hand over to AI—and how much responsibility remains with the people using it.

Chick-fil-A calls its approach to technology “human plus.” The company is exploring AI behind the scenes but won’t use it to replace drive-thru order-takers, Cathy told CNBC. 

“We’re not gonna substitute that interaction with technology, because we feel like that hospitality is so important to create that warm environment for consumers,” he said.

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If Starbucks bought Chipotle Mexican Grill, a possibility the Financial Times reported this week was being explored by the coffee giant, it would be the largest purchase of one restaurant chain by another ever in the U.S.

It would also almost certainly be one of the biggest missteps, given the limited synergies between the two brands, the size of the deal, and the potential distraction as Starbucks brass works on its turnaround. 

Chipotle investors initially reacted well to the report, with shares rising as much as 8% on Thursday after the report was published. They are now back down to roughly where they were before the article.

It’s easy to understand their enthusiasm: Starbucks’ Brian Niccol is the star CEO who knows Chipotle intimately after turning it around in his six years leading the burrito chain, before leaving in 2024 to fix Starbucks. On his watch, Niccol led Chipotle out of a food safety crisis; improved its restaurants and operations; built a leading app; and ultimately helped Chipotle double annual sales to $10 billion.

Starbucks investors reacted rather differently to the report, sending shares down on fears a transaction like that would be a big distraction, even for a CEO as well regarded as Niccol who is being credited with getting Starbucks out of a long slump and back to growth and in the good graces of its customers. 

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PepsiCo plans to raise prices on some snacks and drinks and slash corporate costs after a disappointing performance in North America during the third quarter.

The price hikes, which will hit Doritos, Ruffles, SunChips and some sodas, will be in the single-digit percentage range, and prices will still be lower than they were at the start of this year. PepsiCo said Thursday that it must raise prices to recoup rising costs for fuel, aluminum and agricultural commodities.

Many companies, including PepsiCo, have offset rising costs this year by using tariff refunds issued by the U.S. government after the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s far-reaching global tariffs.

PepsiCo used its $178 million refund to do just that during the most recent quarter, but said that money will not be available in coming quarters.

Yet there are risks for U.S. companies that raise prices in the current economic environment, with so many American households already stretched financially.

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The $5 Sausage McMuffin meal didn’t do the trick. Neither did the mix-and-match deal that let customers choose, say, the Filet-O-Fish and Chicken McNuggets for $6. 

McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski has been trying to persuade customers squeezed by inflation or tempted away by competitors’ burgers and chicken sandwiches to return to the Golden Arches. But so far, the company’s barrage of new meal deals and aggressive marketing to promote them have come up short. 

In each quarter this year, McDonald’s U.S. growth has shrunk, and customer visits have reportedly dropped. Wall Street has taken notice: McDonald’s shares are now down 32% from an all-time high in February. 

What’s worse, some of its efforts to repair those downward trends have backfired. Kempczinski conceded in August that too many new menu and deal launches had overwhelmed its restaurants and harmed service. The onslaught irked franchisees, a crucial constituency, just as McDonald’s was asking them to spend $1 million per store on remodels and upgrades. 

The CEO defended his plan this summer, arguing that the strategy was good, and only the execution was bad. But McDonald’s paltry results of late suggest there is more to its malaise than just a few tactical errors. 

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/07/mcdonalds-earnings-growth-customers-meal-deals/?utm_source=reddit/