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Six retailers took tariff refunds last quarter and none of them disclosed what share reached a shelf.

In February the Supreme Court ruled the White House lacked statutory authority to impose these tariffs under the emergency powers law. Retailers who had paid at the border filed for refunds — and the money landed in Q2. Retailers who had paid filed to get it back, and it landed in the second quarter. Target booked a $994M pre-tax benefit, $752M net, or $1.65 a share. Walmart said it was eligible for about $2.9B. Home Depot took $730M. TJX got $331M, Kohl's $100M, Lowe's around $80M.

A one-time item that size forces a question these companies normally keep inside the building. Does it go to the shopper or the shareholder?

Home Depot said shopper and showed the work, running roughly $685M of its $730M through cost of goods sold. Walmart said the same. CFO John David Rainey told CNBC the money goes to price and that shoppers would see it in the current fiscal third quarter.

Lowe's went the other way, on the record. Marvin Ellison said the company wasn't going to put tariff dollars into price because it wanted to deliver profitability and avoid aggressive pricing action, which came to 11 cents of earnings per share. He said Lowe's would consider sharing with customers in the back half of the year. That's the kind of thing you say when you've already decided you won't.

Target did neither. It mentioned cutting prices on more than 10K items. Separately, it booked the benefit. Both are true and neither explains the other. Target carries more price-perception pressure than anyone else on this list and it still left the two unconnected.

Kohl's is the one I keep coming back to. Michael Bender put $100M into gross margin and sent the rest into deeper inventory. Everyone else here is arguing about what goods cost. Kohl's is telling you the constraint is having them.

The comp math is worse than the disclosure problem. AlixPartners points out that if you weren't the importer of record, the entity that actually paid at the border, the refund never touched you at all. And almost nobody can trace a rebate back to a unit they already sold. Their read is that it creates an unfair positive against last year and an unfair negative against next year. Every second-quarter retail comparison is now bent in both directions. If you're building a model for next year, put that in it now.

"We invested in price" cannot be checked from outside the company. No retailer disclosed what portion of the refund reached a shelf, and shoppers can't back into it either, since a price that held flat may have been absorbing freight instead. The refunds are documented. The pass-through is a claim.

The filings are where this gets settled. A windfall this visible usually produces a footnote the following year. If pass-through is still a talking point twelve months from now with no number under it, we'll have our answer about which one of these was true. I'd rather be wrong about that. Ask me again in October, when the third quarter lands and Home Depot has to show whether that $685M turned up in an actual price.

Lululemon reported gross margin up 200 basis points to 60.5% in the second quarter. Almost none of that came from selling clothes.

The company took in $134.5M of IEEPA tariff refunds and booked them against cost of goods sold. By its own disclosure that was worth 560 basis points of gross margin. Operating margin still fell 190 basis points to 18.8% with all of that help included.

Revenue fell 4# to $2.4B. Comparable sales fell 9%, or 10 in constant dollars, and 12% in the Americas. SG&A rose to 41.7% of revenue from 37.7. Lululemon is spending more to sell less in the market that made it.

The guide says it gets worse. Third quarter revenue is expected down 10 to 11%.

None of that stopped the company from opening nine net new stores, ending at 825, or from spending $330M on buybacks while cash fell to $1.4B.

Heidi O'Neill takes over as CEO next week. She inherits the comp trend and a margin line that will not have $134.5M sitting in it next quarter.