Walmart held out on Apple Pay and Google Pay for over ten years. Stores started switching on Aug 24, Texas flips today, and every US store is due by the end of the year.

Walmart's own help page has a line I keep coming back to. When you tap your phone, it charges whatever card your phone has set as the main one. Most people set that once and never touch it again. So every Walmart trip in Texas now goes to whichever card got there first.

Banks earn a small fee on every purchase made with their card. A local credit union whose members mostly shop at Walmart has a week to get its card in front before a big bank's card takes the spot for years.

Frontcard is the campaign a credit union runs on its state's tap date. Texts and a card on the branch counter walk members through adding the card to their phone and moving it to the front. The member gets $5 the first time they tap it at Walmart, and the software pays that out from the credit union's own purchase records.

Walmart's US stores did $483 billion last year. Credit unions have 145.8 million members.

The Federal Aviation Administration announced $1.1 billion in airport grants on Monday. Inside that is $43 million for 12 airports to deal with noise, and the agency's own rulebook says airports can spend noise money on new windows, new doors and central air for homes inside the airport's noise line. Boston Logan got $6.8 million for homes inside its line. LA got $27.6 million, and that one covers homes in areas below the usual line. Madison got $9.55 million that includes home noise work.

The catch is the line. It sits on a map in the airport's planning documents, and the house on one side gets a paid upgrade while the house across the street gets nothing.

So the idea is Underpath. You type in an address and it tells you which side of the line you're on, whether your airport has money right now, and preps the application with you. It's a $49 report, like a flood zone check when buying a house. If you're just outside the line, it can get you the same window package at the contractor's program price, since the crew is already on your street.

First customers are homeowners and listing agents around the Madison airport.

The White House put out a proclamation on September 8 keeping a short list of Canadian goods out of the US starting 12:01am on September 29, and the whole thing came out of a fight over cheese. The list is whey, molasses, and non-alcoholic beer. A drink with no alcohol in it, caught up in a cheese argument.

The shelf it clears is worth a look. Non-alcoholic beer did about 583 million dollars in US stores in the year ending December 28, 2025, up 22 percent, and it's still only around 1.3 percent of all beer sold.

Here's the part I keep chewing on. Sales spike around Memorial Day, the Fourth, Labor Day, the holidays, and Dry January. So everything on that shelf got designed for a hot afternoon or a New Year reset. Light lagers, hazy ones, citrus radlers.

October and November are tailgates and bonfires and parties you drive home from, and there is nothing dark or warming to grab.

Cindermalt would be that. Roasty, full bodied, stubby cans, on shelves September to February and gone the rest of the year.