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Home Depot put up $47.9B in the second quarter, up 5.7%, with comps of 1.7%. That reads like a healthy quarter until you split the comp into its two parts. Transactions fell 1.0%. Average ticket rose 2.8%, $90.01 to $92.50. The company had 443.2M transactions against 446.8M a year ago.

Home Depot sold to fewer people and charged them more. Richard McPhail described customers engaging in "smaller projects." Smaller projects at higher prices is what tariff pass-through looks like from the register.

Then there's the guidance. Home Depot reaffirmed the full year, and the release says that guidance includes IEEPA tariff refunds expected to partially offset unplanned fuel, energy, and product input costs. Unplanned. The company is holding its number with a refund it has not collected, against costs it did not forecast, and it sized neither one.

QXO reported August 13. Sales of $3.25B, $595M of that Kodiak, bought April 1. Adjusted EBITDA of $272M. Adjusted net income of $130M against $109M a year ago.

Adjusted diluted EPS went the other way. $0.08 from $0.11.

Both numbers are correct, which is the point. Preferred dividends doubled, $26M to $54M, including a Series C that did not exist last year. Diluted share count went from 702.0M to 911.8M. What was left for common holders got smaller, $73M from $76M. Adjusted EBITDA margin fell to 8.4% from 10.7%.

That is the price of buying three billion dollars of revenue with preferred stock and equity. QXO published no organic growth, no same-store figure and no guidance. Brad Jacobs is targeting more than double the EBITDA by 2030 and $50B in revenue inside the decade. TopBuild closed July 1, so this quarter says nothing about it either way.

GXO is the control group here, because GXO actually moves the units. Revenue rose 4.3% to $3.44B, organic growth 3.4%. Omnichannel retail, its largest vertical at $1.637B, grew 0.7%. Operating income fell to $77M from $89M.

Home Depot's transaction count is down. QXO will not publish one. GXO handles the freight, and its retail volume did not move.

Home Depot spent years buying SRS and GMS. QXO assembled Beacon, Kodiak and TopBuild inside eighteen months. Both wrote very large checks on the same premise, which is that the contractor is about to get busier. The contractor did not get busier in the June quarter, at any of the three companies that would have seen it first.

Home Depot's tariff refund is the only line in these releases with enough room in it to change that math. It is also the only one nobody put a number on.

Target and Ulta's shop-in-shop partnership ended Sunday. Target now owns a beauty business it had partly outsourced since 2021.

The numbers say it can carry it. First quarter net sales rose 6.7% to $25.4B. Beauty rose 9.5% to nearly $3.4B, growing faster than the company.

The mechanics are harder than the math. The 600-plus Ulta shop-in-shops sat in roughly a third of Target's 2,002 US stores. The replacement, Target Beauty Studio, is planned for about 600 locations with no opening date and no location list announced. Cara Sylvester previewed it in March alongside beauty-specific loyalty rewards.

The category filled up while this played out. Circana puts US prestige beauty at $17.1B for the first half, up 7% Walmart is expanding a specialized beauty associate role to 425 stores.

Target gets the margin and the control. It also gets 600 stores in transition during the stretch it has to prove the turnaround is working.

Watch the beauty comp line in the next two quarters. That is where this shows up.