McDonald’s is leaning into its reputation as a breakfast value offering, vowing to reject a surcharge on meals with eggs while announcing a special one-day discount on Egg McMuffins.

The fast-food giant said in a release that to mark the 50th anniversary of its breakfast-menu cornerstone, customers on Sunday would be able to purchase an Egg McMuffin sandwich, as well as a Sausage McMuffin With Egg sandwich, through the McDonald’s app for just $1.

“At McDonald’s, breakfast isn’t just a meal; it’s a cherished tradition and cornerstone of our brand,” McDonald’s USA President Joe Erlinger said Tuesday. “Every morning when we open our doors, we are a breakfast restaurant.”

Coinciding with the release, a McDonald’s executive emphasized in a LinkedIn post that the chain had no intention to charge customers extra for meals featuring eggs amid a nationwide shortage that has sent prices soaring and prompted at least two other national chains to do so.

‘Unlike others making news recently, you definitely WON’T see McDonald’s USA issuing surcharges on eggs, which are 100% cage-free and sourced in the U.S.,’ wrote Michael Gonda, McDonald’s chief impact officer for North America.

The announcements come as McDonald’s tries to leave a recent slump behind: Earlier this month, it reported its worst quarterly sales drop since the pandemic — but forecast improving results for 2025.

Year to date, its shares are up some 6%, outperforming broader market indexes.

Nvidia is scheduled to report fourth-quarter financial results on Wednesday after the bell.

It’s expected to put the finishing touches on one of the most remarkable years from a large company ever. Analysts polled by FactSet expect $38 billion in sales for the quarter ended in January, which would be a 72% increase on an annual basis.

The January quarter will cap off the second fiscal year where Nvidia’s sales more than doubled. It’s a breathtaking streak driven by the fact that Nvidia’s data center graphics processing units, or GPUs, are essential hardware for building and deploying artificial intelligence services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In the past two years, Nvidia stock has risen 478%, making it the most valuable U.S. company at times with a market cap over $3 trillion.

But Nvidia’s stock has slowed in recent months as investors question where the chip company can go from here. 

It’s trading at the same price as it did last October, and investors are wary of any signs that Nvidia’s most important customers might be tightening their belts after years of big capital expenditures. This is particularly concerning in the wake of recent breakthroughs in AI out of China. 

Much of Nvidia’s sales go to a handful of companies building massive server farms, usually to rent out to other companies. These cloud companies are typically called “hyperscalers.” Last February, Nvidia said a single customer accounted for 19% of its total revenue in fiscal 2024.

Morgan Stanley analysts estimated this month that Microsoft will account for nearly 35% of spending in 2025 on Blackwell, Nvidia’s latest AI chip. Google is at 32.2%, Oracle at 7.4% and Amazon at 6.2%.

This is why any sign that Microsoft or its rivals might pull back spending plans can shake Nvidia stock.

Last week, TD Cowen analysts said that they’d learned that Microsoft had canceled leases with private data center operators, slowed its process of negotiating to enter into new leases and adjusted plans to spend on international data centers in favor of U.S. facilities.

The report raised fears about the sustainability of AI infrastructure growth. That could mean less demand for Nvidia’s chips. TD Cowen’s Michael Elias said his team’s finding points to “a potential oversupply position” for Microsoft. Shares of Nvidia fell 4% on Friday.

Microsoft pushed back Monday, saying it still planned to spend $80 billion on infrastructure in 2025.

“While we may strategically pace or adjust our infrastructure in some areas, we will continue to grow strongly in all regions. This allows us to invest and allocate resources to growth areas for our future,” a spokesperson told CNBC.

Over the last month, most of Nvidia’s key customers touted large investments. Alphabet is targeting $75 billion in capital expenditures this year, Meta will spend as much as $65 billion and Amazon is aiming to spend $100 billion.

Analysts say about half of AI infrastructure capital expenditures ends up with Nvidia. Many hyperscalers dabble in AMD’s GPUs and are developing their own AI chips to lessen their dependence on Nvidia, but the company holds the majority of the market for cutting-edge AI chips.

So far, these chips have been used primarily to train new age AI models, a process that can cost hundreds of millions dollars. After the AI is developed by companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, warehouses full of Nvidia GPUs are required to serve those models to customers. That’s why Nvidia projects its revenue to continue growing.

Another challenge for Nvidia is last month’s emergence of Chinese startup DeepSeek, which released an efficient and “distilled” AI model. It had high enough performance that suggested billions of dollars of Nvidia GPUs aren’t needed to train and use cutting-edge AI. That temporarily sunk Nvidia’s stock, causing the company to lose almost $600 billion in market cap. 

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will have an opportunity on Wednesday to explain why AI will continue to need even more GPU capacity even after last year’s massive build-out.

Recently, Huang has spoken about the “scaling law,” an observation from OpenAI in 2020 that AI models get better the more data and compute are used when creating them.

Huang said that DeepSeek’s R1 model points to a new wrinkle in the scaling law that Nvidia calls “Test Time Scaling.” Huang has contended that the next major path to AI improvement is by applying more GPUs to the process of deploying AI, or inference. That allows chatbots to “reason,” or generate a lot of data in the process of thinking through a problem.

AI models are trained only a few times to create and fine-tune them. But AI models can be called millions of times per month, so using more compute at inference will require more Nvidia chips deployed to customers.

“The market responded to R1 as in, ‘oh my gosh, AI is finished,’ that AI doesn’t need to do any more computing anymore,” Huang said in a pretaped interview last week. “It’s exactly the opposite.”

Denny’s is the latest nationwide restaurant chain to announce surcharges for meals that include eggs in response to a nationwide shortage that has sent U.S. prices skyward.

In a statement, the breakfast giant said that individual markets and restaurants would be responsible for deciding the surcharge price. It declined to quote any pricing examples, describing it as a ‘fluid situation.’

‘Denny’s remains committed to providing our guests with delicious meals they love at the value they expect,’ it said. ‘We do our best to plan ahead with our vendors on items like eggs to minimize the impact market volatility has on our costs and menu pricing.’

Denny’s follows Waffle House among major food purveyors announcing egg surcharges. Many local media reports have also found individual restaurants adding surcharges in recent weeks.

USDA data show a dozen eggs now cost more than $7 on average and have jumped another 10% in just the past week to a fresh all-time high as avian flu continues to spread on many of the nation’s poultry farms.

Direct-to-consumer footwear brand Rothy’s just recorded its best year on record after the company appointed retail veteran Jenny Ming, one of the co-founders of Old Navy, as its CEO. 

Ming took the helm of the flats maker from co-founder Stephen Hawthornthwaite in January 2024. Under her direction, the company grew sales 17% to $211 million last year, its best volume year since it launched nearly a decade ago. 

Comparable sales at its stores grew 20% and it posted positive EBITDA for the full year, with margins above 10%. 

Rothy’s outperformed the U.S. footwear market, which was flat in 2024 compared with 2023, according to Circana. 

Rothy’s growth, which came from an expansion into wholesale and a focus on brick-and-mortar stores, comes as direct-to-consumer darlings find it harder than ever to survive with the pure-play models that once wowed investors at the turn of the decade. 

Once considered the future of the industry, these online-only businesses are now leaning into the retail fundamentals that have long been the building blocks of emerging brands. Wholesale partnerships are a critical customer acquisition tool, and stores still matter.

As these plucky startups contend with the challenges that come with an online-only business, the winners are adapting to a new reality where stores, wholesale partnerships and e-commerce all need to be part of the mix to ensure they can operate profitably. 

“A lot of people are like, why would you be on Amazon? Because people do a lot of searches on Amazon. If we weren’t there, and they type in Rothy’s, a competitor or somebody else would show up. So why wouldn’t we want to be there?” Ming told CNBC in an interview. “To me, it’s really thinking a little bit more holistically and broadly. What our customer would want from us is how we approach it … people shop very different today.” 

Channel diversification will never be a panacea for a business that’s inherently broken or doesn’t serve a market need. The footwear industry and specialty retail overall is more competitive than ever, and Rothy’s needs to continue its efforts to diversify, scale and expand into new categories to keep up its performance.

Soon after Rothy’s launched in 2016, it quickly made a name for itself with its ubiquitous Instagram and Facebook advertisements and an innovative approach on sustainable shoe manufacturing that included using recycled plastic to make machine washable products. By 2019, it was Meghan Markle’s flat of choice and it had developed a cult following. 

Buoyed by a record year for valuations and 0% interest rates, Brazilian footwear company Alpargatas took a 49.9% stake in Rothy’s in 2021 that resulted in a post-investment valuation of $1 billion. 

Rothy’s used the investment to build out a store fleet, but by that time, the company’s growth had stagnated and it was struggling to reach profitability. 

“Once we sort of emerged from the pandemic, you could see a lot of these digitally native brands now sort of saying, OK, now what, right? I need stores. It is so expensive to acquire customers online,” said Dayna Quanbeck, Rothy’s president. ”[With] an e-commerce model … all of your costs are variable, right? Where you really find scale and you really find profitability is where you can leverage your fixed costs, which is stores, really, and wholesale.”

Ming, who served as Old Navy’s president between 1996 and 2006 and later became the CEO of Charlotte Russe, joined Rothy’s board in 2022 and was later asked to take over as CEO. She said no at first, but later agreed to take the helm after she spent a few months consulting and saw the early innings of a transformation beginning to take shape. She immediately started focusing on improving profitability and generating sales momentum by making sure Rothy’s was selling the types of products that its customers wanted — and in the places they shopped. 

“I literally went line by line … looking at what we should spend, what we shouldn’t, you know, and rightsize marketing spend. There was things that, you know, we don’t need,” said Ming, citing office plants as one of the first things she cut. “But the main thing is, driving profitability is really in revenue. You have to be growing your sales in order to really be profitable, right?” 

That’s where Rothy’s new selling strategy came in. In 2024, it began testing with a select number of wholesale partners — Anthopologie, Bloomingdale’s, Amazon and toward the end of the year, Nordstrom.

At the same time, it continued growing its store fleet. Now, a business that drew about 99% of its revenue from its website does about 70% of sales online, with the rest balanced between stores and wholesalers. Combining profitable stores with strong wholesale partnerships, Rothy’s has been able to grow sales and become more profitable at the same time.

“If we were just digitally native forever and ever, you really just can’t get there with the cost of acquisition, with the cost of, you know, just showing up these days,” said Quanbeck. “Honestly, it’s impossible.” 

Looking ahead, Rothy’s is planning to build on its wholesale partnerships and has made stores, along with international expansion, a central part of its strategy. 

Quanbeck said it’s hard to sell customers on everything that makes the brand appealing without them being able to see it in person.

“But when you can walk into the store and you can see it visually, you have a great customer experience where we can really tell the story,” said Quanbeck “It’s additive. And we know that the lifetime value of those customers that engage with us IRL is really high.” 

Quanbeck and Ming, who are alumni of now-bankrupt Charlotte Russe, know all too well the perils of overexpanding unprofitable store fleets, and said they’re taking a balanced approach to brick-and-mortar. The 26 stores Rothy’s has are small and all are profitable and the company plans to open another eight to 10 doors this year, said Quanbeck.

Ming said Rothy’s won’t need hundreds of stores, but she’d like to see the fleet grow to 75, or perhaps even 100. 

“But we also want to make sure our wholesale partners is in the picture,” said Ming. “We’re going to be in [Nordstrom] in March … they have more stores than we will ever have, so they might be in markets that we might not decide to open a store but then we still have a partner for our customer to shop in.” 

When asked if Rothy’s will pursue an initial public offering or look to be acquired, Ming said the business isn’t there yet — and her team doesn’t need the distraction.

“We had a really great year but … I keep telling the team, one year doesn’t make it a trend,” said Ming. “So we’re really focused on this year. I think if we have another great year, you know, maybe a year or two, I think then we could really step back and say, ‘What next?’”