Some quotes from Microsoft’s FTC rebuttal on $ATVI 🧵

“Gaming is now more popular than television, books, music, or movies. The industry generates hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue a year, and is projected to grow substantially in the future.” "Xbox started behind Nintendo and Sony when it began making consoles 20 years ago, and it remains in third place today. Xbox also has next to no presence in mobile gaming, the fastest-growing segment of gaming and the place where 94% of gamers spend their time today."

Five things I learned researching Chipotle $CMG 🧵

1/ In 1998, McDonald’s acquired a stake in Chipotle for ~$50M, and ultimately became its majority owner. But then $MCD reversed course: in Jan 2006, CMG IPO’d at $22 per share. Since then, the stock price has increased >7,000%. 2/ CMG and MCD had almost no supply chain overlap. In 2004, Chipotle began using a McDonald’s DC in Portland. Of the roughly 650 items sourced from the DC, there was ONE common product that could be shipped to either company’s restaurants: a five-gallon bag of Coca-Cola syrup.

Just sold my car to Carvana. A few observations

1/ Used car pricing is insane.

I had a 2015 Civic with 103k miles that I bought for ~$19k (new). First offer from Carvana in April was for ~$10k. Just sold the car for $12.8k. (If I needed to replace it, I would not have sold.) 2 / Carvana bids competitively.

As noted earlier, I started this process in April. Each time I checked over the past six months, Carvana’s offer was consistently 5% - 10% higher than CarMax.

It’s working for them - Carvana rep told me he needs to process 20 purchases today…

Five interesting things I learned while researching Costco (COST)

1 / Costco’s private label brand, Kirkland Signature, generated $52 billion in sales in 2020 (+7% YoY).

To put that in perspective, Best Buy’s total FY21 sales, from 1,100+ stores worldwide, were $47 billion. 2 / For 5 years, Costco stopped selling sugar in Portland, OR because local competitors had better prices (below cost) – “We can’t save them money… if we’re not priced right on sugar, they have every reason to believe we’re not priced right on a Panasonic TV or Michelin tires.”

$COST deep dive out tomorrow morning 😃

Was anybody there for opening day in China?

thescienceofhitting.substack.com Costco had to apologize for being too popular