The Hustle

Cheesecake Factory’s absolutely unhinged design is part of the marketing.

Every location is customized, which means no two restaurants look exactly the same.

And people definitely notice.

The aesthetic has been compared to everything from “Eye of Sauron” to “’90s Tuscan wine mom.”

But that’s part of the point.

Cheesecake Factory wants the entire experience, from the food to the lighting and design, to be memorable enough that you go tell someone about it.

This machine can kill up to 10,000 weeds a minute. With lasers.

That's the idea behind @carbon_robotics' LaserWeeder.

As it rolls through a field, cameras capture every plant underneath it, and an AI decides what's a crop and what's a weed.

Then a laser burns out the weed's meristem, the growth center that produces its new leaves, stems and roots. As long as those cells survive, the weed keeps growing.

Hitting that spot takes sub-millimeter precision.

The target is tiny, the machine never stops moving, and one wrong shot could kill a crop just centimeters away. So 24 NVIDIA GPUs track every weed and correct each shot in real time.

The whole process, from the first image to the laser hitting the meristem, has to happen in about 100 milliseconds.

Killing weeds with a laser, it turns out, is mostly a problem of aim.

Chinese retailers are moving into the space American brands left behind.

In January 2026, @SimonPropertyGp announced it was adding 20+ new @POPMARTGlobal locations across its properties.

That's the biggest mall company in America looking for someone to fill the space American brands left behind.

And Pop Mart isn't alone.

Miniso is targeting 480 US locations by the end of 2026. Mixue is already taking franchise applications. Chinese sportswear giant ANTA is opening in Beverly Hills.

Fast food chain Wallace, with over 20,000 locations in China, just opened its first US store and plans 10 more by the end of the year.

China's hyper-competitive retail industry created the playbook. American shoppers hungry for cheaper options handed them the moment.

American stores are closing. Chinese brands are moving in.

One coffee chain shows how they're pulling it off.

Miniso puts roughly 100 new products on its shelves every week.

The company calls it the "7-Eleven philosophy." Inventory turns over in about 21 days, so what's on the shelf today may not be there next month.

Why move that fast? Low prices were part of Miniso's edge, but a low price is easy to copy.

And it keeps speeding up. By 2025, Miniso was launching around 1,600 new SKUs a month globally, nearly three times the roughly 550 it launched in 2021.

It's working in the US, too. In 2026, the National Retail Federation ranked Miniso the fastest-growing retailer in America, ahead of Dick's, Five Below and Primark.

Its US sales jumped roughly 53% to $466 million.