Hey Snackers,
We are very much an “always online” crowd here, but our early childhoods came before the omnipresent smartphone age, so our parents mostly had to pry us away from the TV, not the iPhone. Today, it’s different: a new survey reported that 57% of 12-year-olds have their own smartphone, and a more surprising 8% of the under-5 set is getting one, too. And the old rules about no screen time or phones for those under 2 seem to largely be going out the window as well.
US stocks nosedived last week after President Trump posted that he was considering a “massive increase” to tariffs on Chinese imports. We’ll get into that more in our main story below. For the second day in a row, consumer staples was the only sector ETF to finish in the green on Friday.
🧠 Test your knowledge on last week’s newsletters with our Snacks Seven Quiz. Here’s the first question:
Which fast-food chain was rated the friendliest?
The S&P 500 has its worst day since April
Late Friday morning, US President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post that he was considering a “massive increase” to tariffs on Chinese imports, and what had been a relatively calm trading day turned into a rough sea of red that ended with the S&P 500 having its worst day since April.
Trump said he’s mulling higher levies as well as “many other countermeasures” because of “the hostile ‘order’ that they have just put out” restricting the export of rare earth metals. He also seemingly canceled his upcoming meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea, saying, “Now there seems to be no reason to do so.”
China-exposed stocks immediately took a sharp turn downward, including:
Wafer fab equipment stocks Lam Research, Applied Materials, and KLA Corp, which all count China as their top market. iPhone seller Apple was also affected, as it counts China as a major market and part of its supply chain.
Chip stocks AMD, Intel, Broadcom, and Nvidia were also hit on the news, as rare earths are needed components for semiconductor production, which is a strategically important industry and seemingly at high risk of being adversely impacted by any US retaliation on China.
Major automakers with large footprints in China sank, including Chinese EV titans like BYD, Nio, and XPeng, along with Stellantis, which heavily relies on revenue from sales in China. EV makers Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid also turned red, as they all source raw materials and/or batteries from China.
The big winners of the news? Rare earth stocks. MP Materials — which the US government recently took a stake in — USA Rare Earth, and Critical Metals all jumped following Trump’s post, as investors bet that the administration could play a bigger role in ensuring US access to the resource.
But none of that mattered to the S&P 500, which counts none of those rare earth companies as members — it finished the day down 2.71%, making Friday the fourth-worst session of 2025, as you can see in this interactive chart.
The Takeaway
The rare earth curbs are far from the only recent example of China stepping up its defense of domestic industry and resources. Qualcomm is the subject of an antitrust investigation, stringent checks of semiconductor shipments are reportedly in place as officials look to keep Nvidia’s chips from entering the country, and separate reporting indicates that US ships will be charged an escalating fee for docking at Chinese ports. In other words, this is unlikely to be the end of it.
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What do Disney+ and your local car wash have in common?
Subscription fatigue is hitting Americans hard in the pocket, with the average price of streaming services slowly increasing year after year. Alongside Amazon Prime memberships and Disney+ accounts, there’s a curiously analog industry that’s taking a regular payment out of a growing share of the population’s bank accounts: car washes.
Car wash memberships have become big business. One of the country’s biggest operators, Mister Car Wash, reported over 2.2 million members of its business in the second quarter this year. Subscriptions now account for 76% of wash sales at the organization, which was bought by a private equity firm before launching an IPO in June 2021.
The benefit of car wash subscriptions for business owners is obvious:
As one analyst told Sherwood News, “You’ve got thousands of dollars in the bank account every morning at 6 a.m., whether you wash a car or not.”
Before, revenue was unpredictable. Bad weather could mean no customers, meaning no sales to pay the staff that’s on duty regardless.
But with dues-paying members, these car wash chains aim for a 70-30 split between memberships and drive-up customers.
While not every car wash chain with a membership model is successful, the practice is so appealing that private equity is getting interested in a piece of the bubble-filled pie.
The Takeaway
Car wash memberships are just the beginning of an encroachment of everyday services into the subscription model. Laundry subscriptions and beauty services are already seeing some entrants. Pet services, including dog walking and grooming, could be another area ripe for revolution. And the car wash industry’s experience suggests that once people get used to paying a monthly fee for a service, they don’t give it up easily.
The Best Thing We Read Today
OpenAI’s internal Slack messages could cost it billions in a copyright suit
For those of you who don’t use the office workplace chat tool Slack, you might not know it’s an acronym for “Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge.” Perhaps some of OpenAI’s employees weren’t aware of that either, as that tool that logs all communication is now part of an AI copyright case. The lawsuit, brought by authors and publishers, concerns OpenAI using a pirated dataset to train AI models, and apparently the plaintiffs requested access to internal OpenAI emails and Slack messages that discussed deleting that data.
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Snack Fact Of The Day
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