Many restaurant chains have had a rough year and a half, as consumers pull back on spending. Major chains have announced restaurant closures: Wendy’s plans to shutter around 300 to 350 restaurants, while Papa Johns will close around 300 and Pizza Hut around 250. If high energy prices continue, the pain will likely only increase: More than two fifths (43%) of consumers, one survey found, said they’ve cut back on meals outside the home due to gas prices.

Against this backdrop, Mediterranean bowl-and-pita purveyor Cava, which increased revenue 22.5% and opened 72 net new stores in fiscal 2025, has managed to thrive. In Q1 2026, its same-store sales were up 9.7% year over year while traffic grew 6.8%. Its revenue grew 32.2% compared with last year’s Q1, and it announced plans to open 75–77 net new restaurants in fiscal 2026. (It had a total of 459 locations at the end of the first quarter.)

Keeping value choices. Cava’s pricing strategy may have something to do with its success. Despite incurring a 1.4% cost increase in January, the chain hasn’t raised prices on its core items.

“Over the past year, we did not raise pricing on our base bowls,” Cava CFO Tricia Tolivar told CFO Brew. “Chicken, roasted vegetables, and falafel are the same price that they were last year, and we believe that’s creating greater accessibility.” Recently, Cava has seen its highest growth “in the lower household income categories,” she said, the same demographic that high gas prices have hit hardest.

Click here for the full scoop on Cava’s strategy.—CV

Some people read tea leaves; we prefer earnings reports.

We don’t need a fortune-teller to state the obvious: Consumers have been capital-G gloomy for quite some time now. But that hasn’t always translated to a spending pullback or a downbeat economy: Executives and economists alike can’t stop calling the economy resilient, like the economy is a plucky small town girl trying her best in the big city in spite of it all.

And in some earnings calls in late April and early May, CFOs and executives adopted that same gutsy ethos, arguing that rising gas prices haven’t rattled consumers as much as one might expect. That was before the Labor Department reported the producer price index climbed 1.4% in April, the largest monthly gain in over four years, according to the Associated Press.

As more retailers report Q1 earnings, we’re getting a more comprehensive snapshot of the consumer. The picture doesn’t look as rosy as other recent earnings reports made it out to be—but we’re not in full-fledged panic mode either.

Let’s take a closer look at the retail landscape.—NP

If you’re a small business owner looking to tap Anthropic’s Claude for the first time, perhaps start with a Monday morning brief that sifts through emails, sales data, and financial reconciliation to supply five key priorities for the week.

That’s the advice of Lina Ochman, Anthropic’s head of US small and medium-sized businesses and product-led growth GTM. She recently oversaw the rollout of the AI lab’s new small business-focused workflow product, Claude for Small Business, that integrates with popular business tools.

Small business owners have much different needs than a big enterprise, Ochman said. They’re often juggling “13 jobs on their plate and a long to-do list” and don’t have the luxury of, say, an entire department building dashboards to forecast cash flow.

“With enterprises, all of these workflows are just so specialized and so much more robust,” Ochman said. “We thought about it from the ground up—how does the small business owner…operate, what are the tools that they use, and what are the items on their to-do list that they think about?”

Tired of repetitive tasks? Read more about Anthropic’s strategy on Founder Brew.—PK

Skip the noise and cut to the jobs that matter. CollabWORK curates openings from top employers and shares them directly in trusted spaces like CFO Brew—click here to see the full list for readers like you.