From store brand to couture brand… Private-label foods have come a long way from the days of knockoff Cheerios gathering dust on the bottom shelf. As shoppers look for deals in the face of higher food prices, retailers are stocking shelves with store-owned food and drink brands. Picture: Target's Good & Gather and Costco's Kirkland. They're seeing results too. Private-label sales have eclipsed prepandemic #s, growing to 20.6% from 18.7% of total US grocery $$ spent.

• Chompin' on Baked Rays: At Casey's (the convenience chain with 2.5K stores), private-label chips were a quarter of all chips sold this summer. Now Casey's says it plans to add 45 private-label products to the 350 already on its shelves.

• Going private: It's not just snacks. Private-label varieties make up nearly half the cheese market and 38% of canned veggies.

Once copycat, now competition… Besides being cheaper, private-label brands are typically more profitable for retailers because they don't have the marketing costs of brand names. And shoppers have responded: Costco's Kirkland Signature brand pulled in $58B in 2021 (and even has its own merch). Walmart's Great Value sales grew 9% between 2021 and 2023, and Wegmans has grown its store-brand biz to 17K+ products.

Brand loyalty only goes so far… As name brands hiked prices during the pandemic, shoppers started to look at store brands in a new light. Private-label sales grew 8% to $108B in the first half of this year, and 54% of shoppers said they'd continue to choose private labels. This summer, Kraft said that store brands haven't followed its own recent price hikes, which has led to bigger price gaps. That could make name-brand price bumps tougher to push through.

Leavin' the chat… Mega bank HSBC is disabling texting on its employees' work phones, Bloomberg reported, after previously blocking staff from messaging on WhatsApp. Financial institutions are required to keep records of their employees' biz messages so that regulators can pull chat logs during investigations. Failure to save messages can = regulators fining companies — and companies fining or firing employees. Earlier this year HSBC paid $45M to regulators over its employees' use of unauthorized messaging apps like WhatsApp. 

• Do not disturb: WhatsApp can be set to auto-delete messages, making it more difficult for employers (and regulators) to monitor.

• SM-mess: HSBC's text ban could be seen as a precaution meant to keep all employees' written communication in preapproved digi venues.

Emoji legislation… SEC Chair Gensler is scrutinizing Wall Street's messaging habits as if it's used up all the texts on his family plan. He started a probe two years ago, when bankers embraced the habit of off-channel messaging while WFH during the pandemic. Regulators found that convos on unofficial channels about deals and other biz topics were so common that one Reuters source called the ensuing sweep "shooting fish in a barrel." They were big fish: the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Barclays, Citigroup, and others $2.7B.

• Widening scope: The SEC recently started investigating the messaging records of private-equity firms including Apollo Global Management and Blackstone.

You can't slip if you don't go on the ice… In response to regulators' crackdown, banks around the world are said to be barring staff from using messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal. But even monitoring messages on official channels (think: work email) can be tricky. Courts ruled this summer that emojis like 🚀 and 💰 can indicate a return on investment, but companies' internal monitoring software may not be hip enough to understand any #nuances.