Tariff refunds have begun rolling in to big U.S. companies. And in some cases, they’re providing a solid boost to corporate earnings. But what about the customers who also paid the price for these tariffs?

Walmart received $2.9 billion back from the federal government in refunds. The retailer said Thursday that all but just under $100 million has been returned, and that the cash is going straight into lower prices. The mechanism is the rollback, Walmart’s temporary price cut. CEO John Furner said the company ran 11,000 of them in the fiscal second quarter, up from 7,200 in the first, with the full effect expected to land in the third quarter. The refunds cover the "Liberation Day" tariffs Trump issued in April 2025, which the Supreme Court ruled had an unlawful basis in February.

Walmart’s haul is a sliver of a much larger reversal. As of July 31, the U.S. had reimbursed businesses roughly $100 billion, with about 300,000 companies eligible for up to $175 billion, CNBC reports. That's a lot of money looking for somewhere to go, and Walmart just set the template for where.

Among the biggest refunds reported so far: Apple, at nearly $2.2 billion; Nike, at $986 million; FedEx, at about $800 million; Amazon, at $640 million; and General Motors, at $500 million. FedEx said it would start disbursing refunds to shippers and consumers later this month.

According to Fortune, Amazon has said it may offer refunds to only a limited number of customers impacted by the tariffs. Target CFO Jim Lee confirmed the company will not issue refunds as a result of the company’s IEEPA refunds, but will use the money towards bringing lower prices. “We have, and we will continue to, invest in price to ensure our guests are getting tremendous value each and every time they visit us at Target.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the quiet part out loud Thursday: the U.S. probably isn't going back into Iran with bombs. Maximum economic pressure, he told CNBC, means "likely there will not be a large-scale kinetic restart" of combat. Translation: This next phase of this war gets fought on balance sheets.

The plan, as Bessent described it, “the toughest sanctions in history,” paired with the naval blockade already choking Iranian ports. He called it “a one-two punch.” The Cabinet secretary’s comments followed President Donald Trump’s declaration on Truth Social that the U.S. plans to choke Iran’s economy by levying major penalties against any country that provides “any type of lifeline” to Tehran. “This will be an ECONOMIC D-DAY,” he wrote.

Trump’s incendiary missives this week were a symptom of growing frustration, analysts said, as the president does not appear to see a way out of the war that he started. Nearly six months after launching attacks on Iran with Israel and 75 days before elections that will determine whether his party retains control of Congress, Trump faces the kind of open-ended conflict he once claimed he would end.

Lab-grown meat was supposed to be in your grocery cart by now. But it isn’t. A new Harper’s essay by Erin Somers goes back to the hype cycle and asks the obvious question nobody in food tech wants to answer: Where did it all go?

Somers revisits the public tasting where two experts, Josh Schonwald (the author of The Taste of Tomorrow) and Hanni Rützler (a nutritionist), worked through a cultivated burger with forks and knives. Schonwald told NBC it landed “somewhere on the spectrum between a Boca Burger and McDonald’s,” said “the absence of fat makes a big difference” and called it “an animal-protein cake.” Rützler told Science it was basically bland. Roughly $150,000 worth of the meat went uneaten. Still, many predicted cultivated meat would reach consumers within the decade.

But, it turns out, the challenges were numerous. Because no animal has to be killed, cultivated meat is better for animal welfare. But the high costs and environmental impact is still debated: cultivated meat could be better or worse for the planet depending on the type of energy used to power the factories that make it. And Popular Science still wonders if it’s any better for us.