Howdy, Fam!

Resiliency often gets sold as toughing out a bad quarter.

The better version looks a lot more like paying attention: noticing what the market's already telling you and moving before it becomes obvious to everyone else.

In today's email:

Keep Pushing Back,
—Chris with Paul, Kyle & Kristi

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Mark Miller Subaru is taking the Carvana playbook somewhere it hasn’t traditionally lived: inside the franchise dealership.

Over the weekend, the Salt Lake City-area Subaru retailer launched Promise Path, a purchase process built around GM Chris Hudson’s pitch: “Skip the salesperson. Keep the dealership.”

Customers can lock in pricing, value a trade, arrange financing, choose protection products, and schedule delivery online. At any point, they can pull in a noncommissioned specialist who picks up exactly where they left off.

Carvana proved years ago that plenty of buyers want to purchase a vehicle with less friction and less human interaction. Mark Miller is applying that same idea inside a franchise store while keeping the dealership and its people available whenever the customer wants them.

Spirit Airlines stopped flying in May, and its corporate data went up for auction. Google won with a $10M bid.

The bounty includes 100M emails, 500M Microsoft Teams messages, and roughly 30M lines of code.

AI labs already mined the internet's public code to build strong coding agents. Private emails and internal chats teach a model something code never could: how people actually collaborate, negotiate, and run a business day to day.

A union representing 5,500 former Spirit employees is fighting the sale. Google says personal information will be scrubbed before delivery. The union argues the data keeps "referential integrity," meaning the links between records stay intact, which is exactly what makes it useful for training AI and exactly what could let anonymized employee data be pieced back together.

A judge is set to make a final ruling on the sale September 9th, but If Spirit has taught us anything, expect a delay.

Walmart just opened its 100th company-owned fast-charging station, this one in Monument, Colorado, bringing its network to 20 states. Most locations have 8 to 16 stalls, and the chargers can push up to 400 kW—fast enough to get someone in and out in about the time it takes to grab groceries.

Walmart already has one of the biggest captive audiences in retail: a store within 10 miles of roughly 90% of Americans, all of them showing up anyway for dinner supplies, prescriptions, and everything in between.

Drivers start and pay for their charging session right in the Walmart app, which means the phone's already out and open before anyone steps foot in the store. Walmart+ members get a discounted rate on top of it, tying the whole charging experience straight into Walmart's existing loyalty program.

Other retailers see the same opportunity. Wawa recently started rolling out charging stalls at its convenience stores, betting drivers will grab a hoagie while they wait. Costco's been running charging partnerships since 2024. Even Waffle House is wiring up across the southeast.

Everyone's chasing the same thing: the time a driver spends waiting around anyway. Whoever handles that well keeps the customer around a little longer, and a little longer usually means a little more spent.