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by The Business Model Analyst
Hello, Biz Enthusiasts!
Rolex now sells used watches at roughly a 30% premium and the premium is on the paperwork, not the watch. Tesla has reopened a queue of $50,000 Roadster deposits from buyers who still have no car. Target's 5% card discount pays Target a little less every year. And 7 Brew spent $123 million on Salad and Go, then kept the drive-thru lanes rather than the salads. Somewhere there is a finance team that bought a salad chain and threw out the salad, which is the single most 2026 sentence in this issue. Let's get into it.
Hot Takes 🚀
1. Rolex Sells Used Watches at a 30% Premium ⌚📜 Rolex's certified pre-owned program moves secondhand watches at about a 30% premium, and the thing carrying that premium is not the watch. It is the certificate that says this particular used Rolex is the real one. Every grey-market dealer just found out what a missing piece of paper costs.
👉 The certificate outlived the watch it describes
2. Tesla Is Taking $50,000 Roadster Deposits Again 🚗💸 Tesla has reopened the Roadster queue at $50,000 a slot, and not one customer has a car. Deposits sit on Tesla's side of the table for as long as the car takes, which makes the waiting list a financing instrument with a sports car attached. The people who paid first are still waiting.
👉 Nobody has driven the thing they paid for
3. Target's 5% Discount Pays Target Less Every Year 🎯💳 The Circle Card hands shoppers 5% off every trip, and what Target itself keeps out of that arrangement shrinks as the years pass. The discount is fixed, the economics behind it are not. A loyalty perk that gets quietly more expensive to the company offering it is a strange thing to build a card around.
👉 Your 5% is loyalty, their 5% is arithmetic
4. Lysol's Maker Built 18 Livestream Studios in China 🧼📹 Reckitt now runs 18 livestream studios in China and puts its own staff in front of the cameras instead of renting influencers by the hour. Most consumer brands treat livestream selling as an agency line item. Reckitt decided the host should be on payroll.
👉 Hiring the host beats renting the audience
5. 7 Brew Paid $123M for Drive-Thrus, Not Salads 🥤🚙 7 Brew bought Salad and Go out of bankruptcy for $123 million and the asset it actually wanted was the real estate: drive-thru lanes already built, permitted and pointed at a road. The salads were the part that came with the box. Buying a restaurant chain for its driveways is either very cynical or very smart.
👉 Somebody paid $123 million for the lanes
Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads
Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:
After a test campaign reached 211,000 households and achieved 1,010% ROAS, the brand went all in to promote its annual sales event. It removed age and income constraints to expand reach and shifted budget to custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.
The results speak for themselves. As Blu Dot increased their investment by 10x, ROAS jumped to 2,308% and more page-view conversions surpassed 50,000.
“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”
Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.
Quick Hits 📰
Uber Just Bought Your Office Lunch Order 🥡📈: Uber is acquiring ezCater, the catering platform where office lunch orders earn up to 5% back. Corporate catering is a scheduled, invoiced, repeat order, which is nothing like the delivery business Uber already runs.
👉 Lunch was never the margin hereGetty Bought 41 Stores on One Lease 🏪🔗: Getty Realty picked up 41 convenience stores in a sale-leaseback written as a unitary lease, so a tenant cannot hand back the weak sites and keep the good ones. One clause carries that entire transaction.
👉 Forty-one stores, one signature, no cherry-pickingSan Francisco One-Bedrooms Hit $4,400 🏢🔑: One-bedroom rents reached $4,400 while the city's office conversion incentive pays developers through a tax rebate that arrives later. Housing supply needs money now.
👉 A rebate that arrives after the lease signsMedicare Advantage Premiums Drop to $12 🏥📉: Medicare Advantage premiums fall to $12 for 2027 while the out-of-pocket maximum goes up. Two numbers moved in opposite directions on the same plan design.
👉 One number fell so another could climbSpotify Sells the Ads Inside Joe Rogan's YouTube Videos 🎧📺: Spotify's renewed Rogan deal lets it sell advertising against the show on YouTube, a platform it does not own. Exclusivity used to be the entire point of that contra
Walmart Pickup Waits on a Robot Maker It Partly Owns 🤖📦: Walmart's pickup orders depend on Symbotic, the warehouse automation company Walmart holds a stake in. Being both customer and shareholder changes who absorbs a delay.
👉 Owning the supplier cuts both waysChatGPT's Chip Is Cheaper Than Nvidia's 💾🏦: OpenAI's Broadcom accelerator costs less per unit than buying Nvidia, and it is harder to borrow against because its resale value is not guaranteed. Lenders price collateral, not performance.
👉 Cheaper silicon is harder to pledge at a bankPorsche's Top Cars Get 20% Pricier 🏁🔧: Porsche is raising prices on its highest trims by about 20% while leaning on parts shared across the range to hit break-even. The badge is exclusive, the components underneath are not.
👉 The parts are shared, the price tag is notAn AI Acne Doctor Costs $4.99 a Month 💊📱: The service writes prescriptions for $4.99 a month and two licensed physicians review every one before it ships. The AI is the cheap part of that sentence.
👉 Two doctors and $4.99 walk into a clinicGas at $4.41 Made Fast Charging a Tie 🔌⛽: With gas at $4.41 a gallon, public fast charging now costs roughly the same per mile, which removes the one argument EV drivers always had. The charging networks still need utilization.
👉 Parity arrived from the pump side
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