When it comes to buying a house, cash is king—but that might be starting to change.

Home Depot’s sales improved during its second quarter as customers focused on smaller projects during the summer months with the U.S. housing sector still mired in a slump.

Revenue increased to $47.86 billion from $45.28 billion, edging out the $47.24 billion that Wall Street had expected, according to a survey by FactSet.

Globally, sales at stores open at least a year, a key indicator of a retailer’s health, climbed 1.7%. In the U.S., comparable store sales rose 1.3%.

“We saw broad based demand across the business as customers continued to engage in smaller projects,” Chief Financial Officer Richard McPhail said in prepared remarks Tuesday.

Customer transactions slipped 1% in the quarter, but the amount shoppers spent rose to $92.50 per average receipt from $90.01 a year earlier.

Healthy spending on smaller projects during the quarter is encouraging, said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData.

“From our data, the number of smaller projects undertaken during the quarter increased by 1.5% over the prior year,” Saunders said in an email. “This may sound unimpressive, but it represents a step change from the declines of previous periods.”

But Saunders also pointed out a potential weakness that is impacting almost all businesses where credit is sometimes required.

“The number of bigger-ticket projects undertaken remains down, falling by 2.1% over last year,” he said. “Concerns around financing and a previous lack of moving activity both remain major drags on the bigger-ticket segment.”

Homeowners that are currently considering taking out loans using home equity are realizing that it is considerably more expensive now compared with the ultra-low rates Americans could count on in the early 2020s. A home project that seemed within reach at a 4% to 5% borrowing rate looks a lot more daunting at 8% or higher.

While the average long-term U.S. mortgage rate fell slightly for the first time in six weeks, it is still up from last year and borrowing costs remain steeper than they were a year ago.

The U.S. housing market has been in a slump dating back to 2022, the year mortgage rates began climbing from historic lows that fueled a homebuying frenzy at the start of this decade.

Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes slowed again in July as record prices and the highest mortgage rates in a year prove to be an insurmountable hurdle for many prospective buyers. Existing home sales fell 1.7% last month from June, the National Association of Realtors said last week.

Home prices continue to rise and hit unprecedented levels for the month of July, NAR said. The U.S. median sales price increased 2% from a year earlier, to $434,100.

For the three months ended Aug. 2, Home Depot earned $4.77 billion, or $4.79 per share. A year earlier the home improvement retailer earned $4.55 billion, or $4.58 per share.

Excluding one-time items, earnings were $4.92 per share. That’s much better than the $4.73 per share that Wall Street predicted.

McPhail, along with Ann-Marie Campbell, senior executive vice president, are overseeing operations while CEO Ted Decker takes a temporary medical leave of absence. The company said last week that it expects Decker to return within the next few months.

Home Depot also announced Tuesday that it is launching express delivery nationwide. The service will get orders to customers within three hours or less. It will be available for a small flat fee in the U.S., with no subscription or membership required.

The Atlanta company has posted solid back-to-back quarterly performances this year though many Americans have struggled to buy a home. Despite the solid performance, Home Depot stuck with its earlier sales growth guidance for fiscal 2026 of between 2.5% and 4.5%. It also left unchanged its expectations that comparable sales will be flat to up 2%.

Home Depot said that its outlook includes tariff refunds, which are expected to partially offset higher fuel, energy, and other product input costs throughout the year. Last year, the company said that it didn’t expect to raise prices because of tariffs, but executive Billy Bastek said at the time that some products that were on Home Depot shelves may disappear.

The company’s stock gained slightly in early morning trading.

The ongoing salmonella outbreaks that have taken grip this summer have now reached dogs.

The U.S. and Canada are negotiating in an effort to reach a truce on tariffs before a 12:01 a.m. Wednesday deadline set by U.S. President Donald Trump.

If no deal is reached, Trump has threatened to impose 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian products, ranging from hockey sticks to tongue depressors.

“We are negotiating,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters Monday, speaking in French. “The negotiations are very intense and delicate. This is not the time to talk about negotiations in public.”

Carney and Trump spoke by phone Monday afternoon about the ongoing trade negotiations, Carney’s office said, underscoring the last-minute push to reach a deal before Wednesday’s deadline.

The two countries have wrangled for decades over trade, poking each other over sore spots like Canadian softwood lumber imports and U.S. access to Canada’s protected dairy market.

Somehow they still managed to remain friends, allies — and trading partners. Canadian soldiers fought alongside Americans in Afghanistan after 9/11. The 5,525-mile U.S.-Canada border is undefended, and nearly 330,000 people and $2 billion dollars’ worth of goods cross it every day; 800,000 Canadians live in the United States.

Trump’s belligerent approach to dealing with Canada marks an extraordinary departure from the traditionally cooperative relationship between the two countries. Trump has hit Canadian goods with tariffs — in a push to bring manufacturing back to the United States — and has repeatedly made inflammatory comments about turning Canada into America’s 51st state.

The Canadian public is fed up. A petition to expel the U.S. ambassador, a Trump ally, has collected nearly 218,000 signatures since July 21. It accuses Ambassador Pete Hoekstra of having “normalized” Trump’s talk of annexing Canada, among other things.

Artificial intelligence is coming to Mozilla Firefox—but only for users who want it.

The standard approach to predicting AI’s impact on jobs involved building rankings based on how many of an occupation’s tasks could theoretically be handled by technology instead. Rankings like these consistently placed managers, financial analysts, and even lawyers near the top of the risk list, often above clerical positions like data entry or filing.

Today, opening statements will be heard in an Oakland, California, courtroom in a landmark trial that could determine whether Meta Platforms, owner of Facebook and Instagram, designed its social media platforms to addict younger users, despite the company being aware of the danger its social media platforms presented to mental health.

El Niño keeps getting stronger—and the intense weather it is set to bring could be a preview of our future in an even warmer world.

It may be game over for gamified token consumption. Tesla spent six months ranking its engineers on internal AI leaderboards by token usage, then thought better of it and capped employee AI spending at $200 per week. This should sound familiar. Uber, Meta, Amazon, Walmart, all reversed course in the same direction.

Over the past decade, we have gotten genuinely good at something difficult: finding remarkable entrepreneurs who use technology for good. We’ve built the prizes, the pipelines, the accelerators. What we haven’t cracked is harder: making their solutions truly stick.

The most disciplined executives I’ve trained have something in common: they stopped relying on discipline. They know that willpower is the least reliable resource in their arsenal—the same reason they don’t run their P&L on individual heroics, or their pipeline on hoping sales reps stay motivated.

I’ve been programming for about 40 years. Lately, I’ve started creating new programs between meetings. The difference is that I can now hand much of the mechanical work to an AI coding tool, then spend my time fixing the interesting parts.

Coresight Research has released its latest report on retail store openings and closings in the United States.

OpenAI on Tuesday launched ChatGPT for Teens, featuring stronger safety protections and features designed to promote healthy use, along with additional controls for parents.

Beige probably rules your room. At least, that’s what a new data visualization reveals.

A billboard outside the Trump Superstore west of Knoxville, Tennessee, reads “Going Out of Business” and promotes 50% off everything storewide. Inside, President Donald Trump’s shrinking fan base can now snag Trump- and America-themed hats, shirts, and other memorabilia at half-price before the owner closes up shop.

Electricity prices keep rising in the U.S. Last year, home electric bills surged at more than twice the rate of inflation. By 2030, by one estimate, residential electricity prices in some areas could be as much as 40% higher than they were in 2025. At least one in three American households struggle to pay energy bills.

In June 2026, a social crypto startup called Fomo raised $75 million in a round led by Index Ventures. The company’s name is apt: It builds virality (and FOMO) by allowing users to follow and copy top traders’ moves on the platform.

When bio-designer Lucia Giron was on family vacation at an island off the coast of North Carolina, a tropical storm flooded the shore, leaving behind small pools of water in the sand.

Red hots. Frosted Flakes. Wonder Bread. The shelves inside the Momentary gallery in Bentonville, Arkansas, are filled with childhood supermarket favorites. Except they look a tick off. The Frosted Flakes box is a little squat, and the Wonder Bread bag features almost hand-scrawled type.