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Walmart’s majority-owned fintech startup OnePay said Monday it was launching a pair of credit cards with a bank partner for customers of the world’s biggest retailer.

OnePay is partnering with Synchrony, a major behind-the-scenes player in retail cards, which will issue the cards and handle underwriting decisions starting in the fall, the companies said.

OnePay, which was created by Walmart in 2021 with venture firm Ribbit Capital, will handle the customer experience for the card program through its mobile app.

Walmart had leaned on Capital One as the exclusive provider of its credit cards since 2018, but sued the bank in 2023 so that it could exit the relationship years ahead of schedule. At the time, Capital One accused Walmart of seeking to end its partnership so that it could move transactions to OnePay.

The Walmart card program had 10 million customers and roughly $8.5 billion in loans outstanding last year, when the partnership with Capital One ended, according to Fitch Ratings.

For Walmart and its fintech firm, the arrangement shows that, in seeking to quickly scale up in financial services, OnePay is opting to partner with established players rather than going it alone.

In March, OnePay announced that it was tapping Swedish fintech firm Klarna to handle buy now, pay later loans at the retailer, even after testing its own installment loan program.

In its quest to become a one-stop shop for Americans underserved by traditional banks, OnePay has methodically built out its offerings, which now include debit cards, high-yield savings accounts and a digital wallet with peer-to-peer payments.

OnePay is rolling out two options: a general purpose credit card that can be used anywhere Mastercard is accepted and a store card that will only allow Walmart purchases.

Customers whose credit profiles don’t allow them to qualify for the general purpose card will be offered the store card, according to a person with knowledge of the program.

OnePay hasn’t yet disclosed the rewards expected for making purchases with the cards. The Synchrony partnership was reported earlier by Bloomberg.

“Our goal with this credit card program is to deliver an experience for consumers that’s transparent, rewarding, and easy to use,” OnePay CEO Omer Ismail said in the Monday release.

“We’re excited to be partnering with Synchrony to launch a program at Walmart that checks each of those boxes and will help serve millions of people,” Ismail said.

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Chipotle Mexican Grill is hoping that Americans’ love for ranch will boost its sales.

On June 17, the burrito chain is launching Adobo Ranch, a spicier take on the iconic condiment that has transcended salads to adorn pizza, chicken wings and chips. The menu item is Chipotle’s first new dip since queso blanco, which launched in 2020.

The debut comes as Chipotle tries to recover from a rough start to the year. In the first quarter, the company reported its first same-store sales decline since 2020. Executives cited a pullback from consumers who had become more concerned about the economy.

The company also lowered the top end of its outlook for full-year same-store sales growth and said traffic wouldn’t grow until the second half of the year.

Shares of Chipotle have fallen 12% this year, dragging its market cap down to $71 billion.

But Adobo Ranch could help to boost the company’s sales if it draws cautious diners back to the chain’s restaurants.

The dipping sauce is made with adobo peppers, sour cream and herbs and spices, according to the company. Adding Adobo Ranch to an order will cost an extra 75 cents.

Ranch outsells ketchup, although NIQ retail sales data shows that mayo still holds the top spot as the favorite condiment of U.S. consumers.

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One day after seeing their largest-ever one-day drop, Tesla shares recovered some losses Friday as the spat between CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump that exploded into public view Thursday took appeared to take a breather heading into the weekend.

Shares in the electronic vehicle maker gained as much as 5% amid broader market gains following a report showing the U.S. added more jobs in May than forecast.

Even with Friday’s rally, Tesla shares are still down approximately 21% in 2025 — a decline that accelerated last week following Musk’s departure from the Trump administration.

Musk, the world’s richest person and until recently Trump’s cost-cutter-in-chief, said last week he was leaving as the head of his Department of Government Efficiency project to refocus on his businesses.

Those companies — Tesla, the satellite and space-launch company SpaceX, the social media platform X and the brain tech startup Neuralink — have faced growing criticism as Musk oversaw deep cuts to the federal workforce. Tesla sales around the world have fallen sharply this year.

Trump and Musk traded escalating insults Thursday afternoon, with the president threatening on his Truth Social platform to ‘terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts.’ Yet there was no sign of any follow through on the threat Friday. At the same time, a senior White House official told NBC News that Trump is “not interested” in a call with Musk.

Tesla stock closed more than 14% lower Thursday. The automaker is Musk’s only publicly traded company — and one that the president tried to boost as recently as March, drawing sharp criticism on ethical grounds for turning the White House driveway into a car showroom just as the company’s stock was plunging.

The Trump-Musk rift has dented Tesla’s stock anew after Musk slammed the GOP spending bill as ‘a disgusting abomination” in a post on X last week.

‘Bankrupting America is NOT ok!’ he wrote in another post, part of an ongoing barrage of public ridicule.

Musk began speaking out after an electric-vehicle tax credit that would help incentivize Tesla purchases was not included in the bill, which is estimated to add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over 10 years. Musk has lobbied congressional Republicans for that tax credit, NBC News reported Wednesday.

‘I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, doesn’t decrease it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,’ Musk told ‘CBS Sunday Morning’ over the weekend.

As Trump spoke about the former DOGE chief in the Oval Office on Thursday alongside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Musk began firing off dozens of posts on X.

‘Whatever,’ he wrote. ‘Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill. In the entire history of civilization, there has never been legislation that both big and beautiful. Everyone knows this!’

Trump pushed back further on Musk’s criticism.

“Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here, better than you people. He knew everything about it. He had no problem with it,” he said during the meeting with Merz. “All of a sudden he had a problem, and he only developed the problem when he found out that we’re going to have to cut the EV mandate because that’s billions and billions of dollars, and it really is unfair.”

As Trump continued speaking, Musk posted another comment: ‘False, this bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it!’

Tech analyst Dan Ives said the EV tax credit isn’t the main factor behind Tesla’s stock slide. “The reason Tesla stock’s off the way it is — and I think overdone — is because of the view that this means that Trump is not going to play nice when it comes to regulatory” issues, he told CNBC on Thursday. The feud between the two men is “not what you want to see as a Tesla shareholder,” Ives added.

‘Where is this guy today??’ Musk added Thursday in yet another post, resharing a compilation of Trump’s past tweets including one in which Trump called the federal debt ‘a national security risk of the highest order.’

‘Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,’ Musk added on social media. ‘Such ingratitude.’

Musk is the richest person on the planet, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index. His net worth of $368 billion is $125 billion more than that of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is ranked second. Musk spent $250 million supporting Trump’s most recent campaign.

The president quipped from the White House that he thinks Musk ‘misses the place.’

‘I think he got out there and all of a sudden he wasn’t in this beautiful Oval Office,’ Trump said. ‘He’s got nice offices too, but there’s something about this one.’

The president’s own publicly traded company, Trump Media & Technology Group, has also suffered in the market. Shares of the Truth Social parent company fell more than 8% Thursday and are down over 41% so far this year.

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President Donald Trump has escalated his sudden rupture with Elon Musk by implying the government could sever ties with the tech titan’s businesses.

‘The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it,’ Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social.

Various estimates have been put forward about just how much Musk’s firms, primarily SpaceX and Tesla, benefit from U.S. government contracts and subsidies. The Washington Post has put the figure at $38 billion, with SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell estimating that company alone benefits from $22 billion in federal spending. Reuters has reported that the true figure is classified because of the nature of many of the contracts Musk’s firms are under.

NASA relies on SpaceX to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The agency’s only other option at the moment is to pay around $90 million for a seat aboard Russia’s Soyuz capsule.

Last year, SpaceX was selected to develop a vehicle capable of safely de-orbiting the International Space Station in 2030, when NASA and its partner space agencies agreed to end operation of the orbiting laboratory. SpaceX is also expected to play a major role in NASA’s efforts to return astronauts to the moon and eventually travel beyond to Mars.

Later Thursday afternoon, Musk posted that he would begin ‘decommissioning’ SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, which regularly flies astronauts and cargo to the ISS, in response to Trump’s threat.

NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens said the agency ‘will continue to execute upon the President’s vision for the future of space.’

‘We will continue to work with our industry partners to ensure the President’s objectives in space are met,’ she said in a statement on X.

Tesla, meanwhile, has benefited from approximately $11.4 billion in total regulatory credits aimed at boosting electric-vehicle purchases, though that figure also includes state-level subsidies. Musk has claimed he no longer needs the credit, which he says now primarily benefits rivals.

Following Trump’s threat, shares in Tesla, which had already fallen 8% on Thursday as the tit-for-tat escalated on social media, declined as much as 15% following Trump’s post. SpaceX is privately held and its shares do not trade on the open market.

Trump’s warning came as part of a stunning exchange with Musk — who spent more than $250 million to help him get elected — that erupted into public view.

Earlier in the day, president told reporters in the Oval Office that he was disappointed in Musk’s criticism of the Republican policy bill that is making its way through Congress. Musk has blasted the bill, calling it a ‘disgusting abomination,’ amid concerns it would worsen the U.S. fiscal deficit.

Musk, who officially left his White House role last week to spend more time on his companies, spent much of Thursday launching into a tirade on X, his social media platform, where he posted a variety of critiques of Trump, the bill and other Republican politicians.

A make-good on Trump’s threat would come at a sensitive time for Tesla, which has seen global sales plunge partly in response to Musk’s very involvement with the Trump campaign. Year to date, its shares are down some 25%.

Trump’s warning also raises the specter that Trump could resurface pending government investigations into Musk’s firms. According to a report in April from Democratic staff of the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Musk’s firms were facing $2.37 billion in potential federal liabilities when Trump took office in January.

Since then, many of those actions have been paused or outright dismissed alongside the rise of the previously Musk-helmed Department of Government Efficiency, which gutted many of the agencies looking into Musk’s businesses.

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Procter & Gamble will cut 7,000 jobs, or roughly 15% of its non-manufacturing workforce, as part of a two-year restructuring program.

The layoffs by the consumer goods giant come as President Donald Trump’s tariffs have led a range of companies to hike prices to offset higher costs. The trade tensions have raised concerns about the broader health of the U.S. economy and job market.

P&G CFO Andre Schulten announced the job cuts during a presentation at the Deutsche Bank Consumer Conference on Thursday morning. The company employs 108,000 people worldwide, as of June 30, according to regulatory filings.

P&G faces slowing growth in the U.S., the company’s largest market. In its fiscal third quarter, North American organic sales rose just 1%.

Trump’s tariffs have presented another challenge for P&G, which has said that it plans to raise prices in the next fiscal year, which starts in July. The company expects a 3 cent to 4 cent per share drag on its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings from levies, based on current rates, Schulten said. Looking ahead to fiscal 2026, P&G is projecting a headwind from tariffs of $600 million before taxes.

P&G, which owns Pampers, Tide and Swiffer, is planning a broader effort to reevaluate its portfolio, restructure its supply chain and slim down its corporate organization. Schulten said investors can expect more details, like specific brand and market exits, on the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call in July.

P&G is projecting that it will incur non-core costs of $1 billion to $1.6 billion before taxes due to the reorganization.

“This restructuring program is an important step toward ensuring our ability to deliver our long-term algorithm over the coming two to three years,” Schulten said. “It does not, however, remove the near-term challenges that we currently face.”

P&G follows other major U.S. employers, including Microsoft and Starbucks, in carrying out significant layoffs this year. As Trump’s tariffs take hold, investors are watching Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report for May for signs of whether the job market has started to slow. While the government reading for April was better than expected, a separate reading this week from ADP showed private sector hiring was weak in May.

Shares of P&G fell more than 1% in morning trading on the news. The stock has fallen 2% so far this year, outstripped by the S&P 500′s gains of more than 1%. P&G has a market cap of $407 billion.

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Use of low-cost e-commerce giants Temu and Shein has slowed significantly in the key U.S. market amid President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports and the closure of the de minimis loophole, new data shows.

Temu’s U.S. daily active users (DAUs) dropped 52% in May versus March, before Trump’s tariffs were announced, while those at rival Shein were down 25%, according to data shared with CNBC by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

DAUs is a measure of the number of people who visit or interact with a platform every 24 hours. Monthly active users (MAUs), a measure of user engagement over a 30-day period, was also down at Temu (30%) and Shein (12%) in May versus March.

The declines were also reflected in both platforms’ Apple App Store rankings. Temu averaged a rank of 132 in May 2025, down from an average top 3 ranking a year ago, while Shein averaged a rank of 60 last month versus a top 10 ranking the year prior, the data showed.

Neither Temu nor Shein immediately responded to CNBC’s request for comment.

The user drop off comes as both Temu and Shein have pulled back on U.S. advertising spend over recent months since the Trump administration’s tariff announcements.

Trump in April announced sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports, including the end of the “de minimis” tariff exemption on May 2, which allowed companies to ship low-cost goods worth less than $800 to the U.S. tariff-free.

In May, Temu’s U.S. ad spend fell 95% year-on-year while Shein’s was down 70%.

“Temu and Shein’s decline in US ad spend was also noticeable in April, as spend decreased by 40% and 65% YoY, respectively,” Seema Shah, vice president of research and insights at Sensor Tower, said in emailed comments to CNBC.

Both Temu and Shein also altered their logistics models in the wake of tariffs, shifting away from a drop shipping model, which allowed them to send items directly from Chinese suppliers to U.S. consumers, and instead, particularly in Temu’s case, building up a network of U.S. warehouses.

Rui Ma, founder and analyst at Tech Buzz China, said such moves were also likely to have impacted the companies’ ad spend strategy and customer acquisition patterns.

“All these additional costs and regulatory hurdles are clearly hurting Chinese platforms’ U.S. growth prospects,” she wrote in emailed comments.

Tech Buzz China research from March showed that a 50% tariff would be the point at which Temu would lose most of its price advantages and find it difficult to operate. The tariff on former de minimis imports currently stands at 54%, having been lowered from 120% amid a 90-day tariff truce between the U.S. and China.

Last week, Temu’s parent company PDD Holdings reported first-quarter earnings below estimates and pointed to tariffs as a significant pressure on sellers.

Temu’s popularity has nevertheless picked up outside the U.S., with non-U.S. users rising to account for 90% of the platform’s 405 million global MAUs in the second quarter, according to HSBC.

Writing in a note last week, HSBC analysts said that was “supported by growth in Europe, Latin America, and South America.” They added that the swiftest of that growth occurred in “less affluent markets.”

“Many (Chinese platforms) are now actively redirecting their efforts toward other markets such as Europe,” Ma said.

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OpenAI on Wednesday announced that it now has 3 million paying business users, up from the 2 million it reported in February.

The San Francisco-based startup rocketed into the mainstream in late 2022 with its consumer-facing artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, and began launching workplace-specific versions of the product the following year.

The 3 million users include ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Team and ChatGPT Edu customers, OpenAI said.

“There’s this really tight interconnect between the growth of ChatGPT as a consumer tool and its adoption in the enterprise and in businesses,” OpenAI’s chief operating officer Brad Lightcap told CNBC in an interview. The company supported 400 million weekly active users as of February.

OpenAI expects revenue of $12.7 billion this year, a source confirmed to CNBC. In September of last year, the company expected to see an annual loss of $5 billion on $3.7 billion in revenue, according to a person close to the company who asked not to be named because the financials are confidential.

Lightcap said OpenAI is seeing its business tools adopted across industries, including highly regulated sectors like financial services and health care. Companies including Lowe’s, Morgan Stanley and Uber are users, OpenAI said.

The company also announced new updates to its business offerings on Wednesday.

ChatGPT Team and ChatGPT Enterprise users can now access “connectors,” which will allow workers to pull data from third-party tools like Google Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint, Box and OneDrive without leaving ChatGPT. Additional deep research connectors are available in beta.

OpenAI launched another capability called “record mode” in ChatGPT, which allows users to record and transcribe their meetings. It’s initially available with audio only.

Record mode can assist with follow up after a meeting and integrates with internal information like documents and files, the company said. Users can also turn their recordings into documents through the company’s Canvas tool.

Lightcap said enterprise customers have been asking for updates like these, and that they will help make OpenAI’s workplace offerings more useful.

“It’s got to be able to do tasks for you, and to do that, it’s got to really have knowledge of everything going on around you and your work,” Lightcap said. “It can’t be the intern locked in a closet. It’s got to be able to see what you see.”

OpenAI said it has been signing up nine enterprises a week, and Lightcap said the company will try to sustain that pace over time.

“People are starting to really figure out that this is a part of the modern tool stack in the knowledge economy that we live in,” he said.

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A nationwide coordinated crackdown on retail crime — what authorities are calling the first of its kind — led to hundreds of arrests in 28 states last week.

The blitz, led by Illinois’ Cook County regional organized crime task force, involved more than 100 jurisdictions and over 30 retailers including Home Depot, Macy’s, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walgreens, Kroger and Meijer.

“When you give specific focus to a crime, it reverberates,” Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart told CNBC. “When they see it is being prosecuted and taken seriously, it deters conduct. They don’t want to get caught.”

Organized retail crime — a type of shoplifting where groups of thieves work together in targeted operations to turn stolen goods into cash — has grown in scale and scope in recent years. CNBC previously reported on the extensive law enforcement efforts to take down retail crime organizations.

While aggregate numbers for retail theft are difficult to quantify, retailers reported 93% more shoplifting incidents on average in 2023 compared with 2019, according to a survey conducted by the National Retail Federation. Those surveyed also reported a 90% increase in the associated dollar losses over that same time period.

Some critics point to a lack of enforcement and felony thresholds for allowing criminals to continue committing theft. It’s something Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke has been focused on since taking office in December.

On her first day in office, O’Neill Burke said prosecutors would pursue felony retail theft charges in accordance with state law, when the value of the goods exceeds $300 or when the suspect already has a felony shoplifting conviction.

Before her taking office, retail theft felonies were charged only if the value of the stolen goods was $1,000 or more or if the suspect had 10 or more prior convictions.

Since Dec. 1, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office has filed charges in 1,450 felony retail theft cases, the office said.

The goals of the coordinated operation, O’Neill Burke told CNBC, is “to have one day where we focus and concentrate on [retail theft] and we share intelligence about it — about what we learned about the network, so that gives us more tools on how to take this network down.”

It was the coordination between law enforcement and prosecuting attorneys that got a number of the involved retailers to participate in the blitz.

“Collaboration is key to making a meaningful impact,” Ulta Beauty Senior Vice President of Loss Prevention Dan Petrousek told CNBC. “That’s why we were proud to participate in the National ORC Blitz alongside dedicated law enforcement and prosecutorial partners.”

Ulta Beauty had teams participating across nine states in last week’s operation, providing law enforcement with information on incidents of retail crime.

“Organized retail crime remains one of the most significant challenges in our industry,” said Marty Maloney, Walgreens director of media relations. “In this most recent operation we worked closely with law enforcement partners across nearly 20 cities and at over 40 locations to help curb this trend.”

A representative for Home Depot told CNBC that while overall theft is down, investigated incidents of organized retail crime are still up double digits year over year.

Now that the operation has concluded, the group is pulling together each jurisdictions’ observations and sharing data to continue to help crack down on retail theft.

Other participating retailers reached for comment by CNBC, including Macy’s, T.J. Maxx and Target, said they’re committed to partnering with law enforcement and pushing for stronger laws to combat retail crime.

California Highway Patrol arrests retail crime suspect in Long Beach, CA.Courtesy: California Highway Patrol.

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Peloton on Tuesday launched its own marketplace for reselling used equipment and gear as the company looks to capitalize on the many bikes and treadmills collecting dust in people’s homes.

The platform, dubbed Repowered, will allow members to post listings for their used Peloton equipment and gear and set a price with help from a generative AI tool, the company said.

Sellers have the final say on how much to list the item for, but the AI tool will suggest a price based on information about the product, such as its age, Peloton said.

It said sellers will get 70% of the sales price, while the rest will be shared between Peloton and its platform provider, Archive. Sellers will get a discount toward new equipment, while buyers will see the activation fee for a used product drop from $95 to $45, the company said.

Buyers will be able to see the equipment’s history on the listing and have the option to get the item delivered for an extra fee, Peloton said.

The resale market for used bikes and treadmills is booming. The company said it wants to streamline the sale process for members and offer a safe and comfortable way for prospective customers to buy equipment. It’s also an opportunity for Peloton to reach a wider array of new users as it plots a pathway back to growth.

Last summer, Peloton said it had started to see a meaningful increase in the number of new members who bought used Bikes or Treads from peer-to-peer markets such as Facebook Marketplace. At the time, it said paid connected fitness subscribers who bought hardware on the secondary market had grown 16% year over year, and it believed those subscribers exhibited a lower net churn rate — or membership cancellation — than rental subscribers.

Peloton has plenty of enthusiastic fans who use the company’s equipment every day, but some people have likened it to glorified clothes racks because so many people stop using them. While those owners paid for their exercise machines when they bought them, many have canceled their monthly subscription, which is how Peloton makes the bulk of its money, according to the company’s financial records.

Peloton is already reaping the subscription revenue from people who bought hardware on the secondary market, but now it will get a cut of that market with little upfront cost.

Repowered is a direct challenger to not just Facebook Marketplace but also the burgeoning startup Trade My Stuff, formerly known as Trade My Spin, which sells used Peloton equipment.

Trade My Stuff founder Ari Kimmelfeld told CNBC he previously met with Peloton to discuss ways to collaborate.

But Peloton said Repowered isn’t connected with Trade My Stuff.

Repowered is launching first in beta in New York City, Boston and Washington, D.C., with plans to go nationwide in the coming months, Peloton said. The platform will launch first to sellers, and once there’s enough inventory available, it’ll go live to buyers, the company said.

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Shares of Dollar General jumped nearly 16% on Tuesday after the discounter raised its outlook, saying it drew more middle- and higher-income shoppers amid fears that higher tariffs would hurt consumer spending.

The Tennessee-based retailer beat quarterly expectations for revenue and earnings. The company said it now anticipates net sales will grow about 3.7% to 4.7%, compared to its previous expectation of about 3.4% to 4.4%. It expects diluted earnings per share to range from $5.20 to $5.80, compared to its prior outlook of approximately $5.10 to $5.80. Dollar General anticipates same-store sales will increase 1.5% to 2.5%, higher than its previous guidance of about 1.2% to 2.2%.

Here’s how the retailer did for the fiscal first quarter compared with Wall Street’s estimates, according to a survey of analysts by LSEG:

In the three-month period that ended May 2, Dollar General reported net income of $391.93 million, or $1.78 per share, compared with $363.32 million, or $1.65, in the year-ago quarter.

As of Tuesday’s close, shares of Dollar General have risen about 48% so far this year. That far exceeds the roughly 1% gains of the S&P 500 during the same period. Shares of the retailer closed at $112.57 on Tuesday, bringing Dollar General’s market value to $24.76 billion.

Dollar General’s first-quarter results — and its stock performance — stand out in a retail industry that is already taking a hit from President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Companies including Best Buy, Macy’s and Abercrombie & Fitch have cut their profit outlooks due to tariffs.

On an earnings call Tuesday, Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos said the company has worked to reduce its exposure to China — and limit price hikes for shoppers. He said the retailer has worked with vendors to cut costs, moved manufacturing to other countries and made changes to its products or swapped them out for other merchandise.

He said direct imports make up about a mid- to high single-digit percentage of its overall purchases and indirect imports are about double that.

“While the tariff landscape remains dynamic and uncertain, we expect tariffs to result in some price increases as a last resort, though, we intend to work to minimize them as much as possible,” he said.

CFO Kelly Dilts said on the company’s earnings call that full-year guidance assumes that Dollar General will be able to offset “a significant portion of the anticipated tariff impact on our gross margin, but also allows for some incremental pressure on consumer spending.”

Customer traffic dipped by 0.3% in the first quarter compared to the year-ago period, but shoppers spent more when they visited. The average transaction amount rose 2.7%, as sales in the food, seasonal, home and apparel categories all grew.

Vasos added tariffs have also increased U.S. consumers’ desire to find deep discounts. Vasos said the company’s first-quarter results reflect Dollar General’s gains from “customers across multiple income bands seeking value.”

He said store traffic and the company’s market research indicates that more middle- and higher-income customers have come to its stores more frequently and spent more when they visited.

“We are pleased to see this growth with a wide range of customers and are excited about our ongoing opportunity to grow [market] share with them,” he said.

Those gains have helped as Dollar General’s core customer “remains financially constrained,” Vasos said. According to a survey by the company, he said 25% of customers reported having less income than they did a year ago and almost 60% of core customers said “they felt the need to sacrifice on necessities in the coming year.”

Dollar General’s sales largely come from U.S. consumers who are on a tight budget. About 60% of the retailer’s sales come from households with an annual income of less than $30,000 per year, Vasos said last fall at a Goldman Sachs’ retail conference.

In addition to wooing value-conscious shoppers, Dollar General has tried to tackle company-specific problems that drew government scrutiny and tested customer loyalty. The discounter, which has more than 20,000 stores across the country, has paid steep fines to the Labor Department for workplace safety violations due to blocked fire exits and dangerous levels of clutter.

Vasos highlighted some of the ways that Dollar General has tried to improve the customer experience. Among them, it’s worked to reduce employee turnover, and it took about 1,000 individual items off its shelves so it can keep top-selling items in stock, he said.

Dollar General has launched its own home delivery service, which is now available at more than 3,000 stores. Its deliveries through DoorDash have grown, too, with sales up more than 50% year over year in the quarter.

Dollar General has also bulked up its merchandise categories outside of the food and snack aisles, adding more discretionary items like seasonal decor and home items.

Vasos said sales in those categories have also gotten a boost from middle- and higher-income customers shopping its stores.

Its newer store chain, Popshelf, sells mostly discretionary items and caters to consumers with higher household incomes than Dollar General’s typical shoppers. Vasos did not share a specific metric for the chain, but said Popshelf’s same-store sales delivered strong growth in the quarter. The company recently changed the store layout to emphasize toys, beauty and party candy.

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