Malls, Money, and a Mediterranean Mood Swing

It’s National Cheeseburger Day, and McDonald’s will give you a free Double Cheeseburger today with a $1 app purchase.

We respect a good deal.

McDonald’s has “I’m Lovin’ It.”

We’re a little more partial to “I’ll take the $500.”

Everyone Buried the Mall.

*Surprise!*It Just Posted a 13% Gain.****Mallorca Wants Fewer Drunksand More AmericansFrance’s Record Heat Is Putting

More Booze in the BubblyThe

AI Agent RaceMay Come Down to Who Already Owns Your AttentionHow Do You Compete When

**Everyone Copies the Homework?**A

Small SBA ChangeWith a Pretty Big Dollar SignAnd from Around the Web: A

$2,500go-kart, a $1.50hot dog date, and a**$59,000**“frying pan.”

The news shaping business, finance, and technology, for better or considerably worse.

The death of the American mall felt like a foregone conclusion. Turns out, somebody forgot to tell the malls.

Over the past year, mall values jumped 13%, more than twice the gain of the broader commercial real estate market. Consumer spending has held up, while owners have leaned into luxury retail, better restaurants and entertainment. Simon Property Group, the country’s largest mall owner, has been hitting record stock highs.

That is a long way from five years ago, when pandemic closures piled onto department-store failures and fears that online shopping would finish the job. Nearly 200 malls have closed since 2008, leaving about 900 operating across the U.S.

Now even Paris-based Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield is getting back in after once planning to leave the U.S. The company is spending nearly $1B this year to take full control of Westfield UTC in San Diego and Westfield Southcenter.

And it isn’t just trophy malls. Middle-market properties are seeing higher occupancy and sales, helped in part by younger shoppers using malls to shop and socialize.

The bigger shift may be what malls are becoming. Vacant department stores are giving way to restaurants, entertainment and other experiences. Unlocking the dirt is the real value.

Stale pretzels and tchotchkes are out. Long live the mall.

The mall comeback is a reminder that a tired asset can still be valuable if owners are willing to change what it’s for.

🔗 Take a lap through the mall comeback.

Mallorca has spent generations selling turquoise water, hidden coves and white-sand beaches to European vacationers. It worked. Maybe a little too well.

The Spanish island, home to about 1M people, is on track to welcome roughly 14M tourists this year. During peak summer months, its daily population can jump 50%. Residents have repeatedly protested the crowds, which have brought traffic, strained water supplies and a housing crunch so severe that some locals near Palma are living in camper vans.

The problem is obvious: Mallorca depends on the very tourists locals are sick of. Tourism accounts for nearly half of economic activity in the Balearic Islands.

So the island is trying a different strategy: fewer bachelor parties, more big spenders.

Mallorca wants to move away from its reputation for cheap package holidays and rowdy British tourists and toward wealthier visitors, especially Americans. U.S. travelers in Spain spent about $410 a day in July, versus $240 for Germans and $260 for British travelers. American visits to Mallorca are already up 60% this year through June.

Officials have started cracking down on the old party model with fines for drunken behavior, bans on party boats and a **six-drink limit **at some all-inclusive hotels.

There is still one rather large problem: housing. Thousands of homes and villas have been converted into short-term rentals, including an illegal rental market that has squeezed supply even further.

Mallorca became a mass-tourism destination under Francisco Franco in the 1950s and ’60s. Now, decades later, it is trying to undo part of what made it famous without killing the industry that pays the bills. Basically: less beer pong, more Amex Platinum.

Mallorca’s problem is one plenty of businesses would recognize: when demand becomes too much of a good thing, sometimes the answer is changing the customer, not chasing more of them.

🔗 See how Mallorca plans to trade the pub crawl for the platinum card.

France just had its hottest summer ever, and Champagne is feeling it.

Record heat and drought forced growers in the Champagne region to harvest grapes earlier than ever. The grapes had higher sugar levels than normal, and fermentation has a rather simple rule: more sugar, more alcohol.

That creates a problem when your wine comes with strict government rules.

For this year’s harvest, French authorities are allowing Champagne to reach up to 15% alcohol, instead of the usual 13%. More punch in that holiday punch.

This applies only to Champagne from the Champagne region, not every sparkling wine with a cork that could injure a dinner guest.

Most producers still aren’t expected to go above 13%, since they can blend this year’s wine with reserves from prior harvests. The bigger problem is volume. Champagne production is expected to fall by about half this year, while total French wine output is forecast to drop 6%.

And this may not be a freak year. Growing seasons like this could become normal within the next 10 to 15 years.

You won’t see much of the affected Champagne until around** 2028 **because it needs at least 15 months to age. Meanwhile, France has also temporarily eased rules for several cheeses after the heat scorched grazing pastures.

We do not claim to be agricultural experts, but letting the cows drink the extra Champagne feels like an obvious solution nobody has properly considered.

Extreme weather is forcing one of the world’s most tightly regulated industries to bend rules that have defined its product for generations.

🔗 Pop the cork on France’s increasingly complicated Champagne problem.

Meta launched Muse last week,** a personal AI agent** that can book travel, clear inboxes, fill out forms, lower bills and complete purchases. It can even check a home camera. In other words, it does more than answer questions. It actually does things.

Muse also has a personalized Feed pulling from connected accounts and the web. That may sound minor, but it gives users a reason to open the app even when they are not actively asking the agent to do something.

Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang says** most people should be able to use Muse for free,** with $20 and $100 plans aimed at heavier users. For now, Meta appears more interested in adoption than squeezing subscription revenue from every user. Zuckerberg has said Meta initially plans to take only a very small cut of transactions completed through its agents.

The bigger prize is commerce. ARK estimates AI agents could influence nearly $9T in online spending by 2030, about 25% of global e-commerce. If agents start collecting fees for sending customers and completing purchases, the revenue opportunity gets very large, very quickly.

And Meta has something most AI startups do not: distribution. Its apps reach about 3.6B people every day.

Competitors are coming. Instinct, a text-and-call assistant, raised $350M at a $2.5B valuation in August and remains in private beta. xAI has Grok Bot, another persistent agent.

But Meta does not need to find an audience. It already owns several of the places the audience spends its day.* That*

In the AI agent race, distribution may matter just as much as the technology, and Meta already has billions of potential users within arm’s reach.

🔗 Meet the AI agent Meta hopes you’ll trust with your inbox, shopping cart and, apparently, your entire digital life.

About 15 years ago, Driscoll’s went to China with a plan: turn blueberries into the country’s next big food trend.

It worked. Then came the competition.

The California company scouted farmland in Yunnan, brought in high-tech growing methods and locked up premium blueberry varieties. By 2020, it was producing thousands of tons for Chinese supermarkets.

Then local growers piled in. Some copied Driscoll’s greenhouse designs and patent-protected varieties, Chinese courts have ruled. State banks helped fuel the boom with special loans for blueberry growers.

The result was enormous. China’s blueberry production has grown 25X since 2010. In 2021, it passed the U.S. as the world’s largest producer. By 2025, China was growing twice as many blueberries as the U.S.** Then supply did what supply does.**

Prices crashed by half or more, squeezing profits across the industry, including Driscoll’s growers. Western genetics firms have responded by licensing more varieties to Chinese producers rather than watching them get copied anyway.

Driscoll’s is adapting too. It is growing more offseason blueberries in China and exporting more fruit from Yunnan to other Asian markets. The company is still betting on China, where blueberry consumption per person remains below the U.S. and Europe.

Driscoll’s helped build the market. Now it has to survive the market it helped create.

Creating demand is great, right up until everybody else sees the opportunity and floods the market you just spent years building.

🔗 See how Driscoll’s blueberry boom turned into a very crowded patch.

One minute of money talk. Several expensive mistakes avoided.

with Matthew R. Meehan

Starting October 1, some SBA-backed business loans are getting cheaper.

For certain manufacturers, food-supply businesses, and companies in qualifying rural areas, the SBA is waiving the upfront guaranty fee on 7(a) loans up to $700,000. On a loan that size, that can save around $15,750.

There are similar breaks coming to some SBA 504 loans, which are often used for things like commercial real estate and equipment.

I bring this up because financing is already expensive enough. Between rates, fees, closing costs, and everything else, the number you think you’re borrowing and the number you actually have to work with are not always the same.

So any change that lowers the upfront cost is worth looking at, *especially *if you were already planning to buy equipment, real estate, another business, or put money into expansion.

If you’re in one of these industries and this sounds like something you’d want to explore,** set up a 15-minute call with us at Credit Banc.** Happy to take a look at it with you and see if it fits.

The internet’s least supervised corner. Useful? Debatable. Entertaining? Always.

**Minivan, Meet Race Car:Toyota Gazoo Racing launched afor kids and adults that fits in the back of a minivan and weighs 183 pounds. It’s only sold in Japan for now, so$2,500 go-kart*American parents will have to find another way to make youth sports more expensive.*Love in Bulk:Costco is becomingwhere people now go for date nights, playdates, club meetups, and even weddings. Nothing says human connection quite like bonding over aAmerica’s unofficial “third place,”$1.50 hot dogand a36-pack of toilet paper.**Dinner Can Wait:Rolex just launched the, a new annual-calendar watch named after a vintage model nicknamedPerpetual Padellone“the large frying pan.”It starts at$59,000, proving that if you give anything an Italian name and put Rolex on the dial, someone will find a way to charge five figures for it.

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