Target is grading employees on friendliness as CEO Michael Fiddelke pushes to win shoppers back.
 

Target wants friendlier stores, and now it's putting that on employees' performance reviews. The retailer is rolling out a formal assessment that scores workers on how they greet and engage with shoppers, alongside reliability, teamwork, and execution. Workers are also now expected to smile, make eye contact, and greet any customer within 10 feet, and a new dress code requires red shirts with jeans or khakis.

These softer changes sit atop a harder set of fixes already underway. CEO Michael Fiddelke has been adding staffing hours and working to keep shelves stocked after shoppers complained about longer checkout lines and empty shelves. Target plans to open more than 30 new stores and remodel more than 130 locations this year as part of the broader effort to win customers back.

McDonald's is admitting it will miss its 2030 target for reducing its fossil fuel pollution.
 

McDonald's is falling well short of its 2030 goal to reduce its air pollution. The fast-food giant has reduced the fossil fuel emissions generated across its supply chain by only about 3% since 2018, when it was planning to cut that pollution in half. About 95% of McDonald's locations are franchises, and the beef, agriculture, and energy powering that vast network make up nearly all of its emissions.

The company is framing the miss as an industry-wide problem rather than a failure of ambition, pointing to slow clean energy growth and fragile global supply chains. McDonald's still hopes to reduce its net fossil fuel emissions to zero by 2050 and will back that with at least $1 billion in investments in its supply chain over the next decade, focused on regenerative agriculture for beef, soy, palm oil, and coffee.

Snowflake reported surging revenue and signed a huge cloud deal as businesses ramp up AI spending.

Snowflake may not have name recognition, but its numbers are making headlines. Snowflake helps businesses store, manage, and analyze all their data in one place. When a company wants to build an AI tool that automates inventory decisions, for example, that AI needs to sit close to the data and process it quickly. Demand for that kind of service is growing fast, with revenue climbing 33% from a year ago to $1.39 billion. The company also raised its full-year forecast, driven by more businesses running their actual AI projects on its platform rather than just testing the waters.

The bigger headline is a five-year, $6 billion commitment to the leading cloud provider, Amazon's AWS. The agreement gives Snowflake access to custom AI chips and deeper infrastructure ties at a moment when compute capacity is tight across the industry. CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy called the quarter a clear turning point, with AI moving from experimentation to real business use.

Dell posted its fastest sales growth since going public, driven by surging demand for AI servers.

Dell Technologies just posted its fastest revenue growth since going public in 2018. Companies are rushing to buy the specialized servers needed to build and run artificial intelligence systems, and AI server sales grew 757% year over year as cloud companies, governments, and enterprises continued placing large orders throughout the quarter.

The broader business held up too, with laptop and PC sales growing 17%, a sign that demand runs deeper than just AI infrastructure. Dell raised its full-year revenue outlook by roughly $25 billion in a single quarter and lifted its AI server target for the year to $60 billion, reflecting how central the company has become to building the world's AI infrastructure.

Eli Lilly is buying three vaccine developers and stepping back into infectious disease prevention.
 

Eli Lilly is spending up to $3.8 billion to acquire three small vaccine developers. Curevo is building a shingles vaccine designed to cause fewer side effects than the current standard shot. LimmaTech is working on vaccines for staph infections and bacteria increasingly resistant to antibiotics. Vaccine Company is developing a vaccine against the Epstein-Barr virus, a common infection linked to certain cancers and neurological diseases.

The deals are part of a bigger 2026 acquisition run for Lilly, which has accelerated on the back of strong sales from its obesity drugs. Lilly says the strategy is aimed at preventing disease at its source rather than treating its consequences.