ONLINE FOOD DELIVERY FEES

The FTC has formally opened a rulemaking on delivery app fees. On April 16, 2026, it published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking (Docket 2026-07473) targeting how DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, and grocery delivery platforms disclose their charges. Translation: the agency thinks the way these apps quote a price while you browse, then stack on service fees, delivery fees, small-order surcharges, and 'regulatory response fees' at checkout, is deceptive enough to need a binding rule.

Nothing is illegal yet. This is the start of a proceeding, not the end. The FTC is taking comments and data to decide whether to ban the practice outright.

What matters for now: the total at final checkout is often 30–50% above the menu price you saw when picking the restaurant. Some of those official-sounding fees ('regulatory recovery,' 'city fee') are not government charges — they're platform margin in a uniform. The checkout screen is the only place the real number lives, and it appears at the point where you've already chosen your food and are least likely to back out.

Strategy: Click through to the final checkout screen before you commit. Compare that total to pickup, a competing app, and the restaurant's own website — the restaurant's direct site is almost always cheapest because there's no platform markup on the items themselves.

Source: Federal Register →

MEAT PRICING AND AGRI STATS

On May 7, 2026, the California Attorney General, the DOJ (Department of Justice), and AGs from Minnesota, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah settled with Agri Stats, an Indiana data firm. The allegation: Agri Stats collected detailed sales and pricing data from meat processors, then fed it back to those same processors in a form that let them spot when they were priced below the industry average and nudge prices up. No meeting, no handshake, no smoke-filled room — just a shared dashboard doing the coordinating.

Subscribers represented over 90% of broiler chicken sales, 80% of pork sales, and 90% of turkey sales. Executives testified they could not recall a single time they used the data to lower a price.

Under the settlement, Agri Stats must shut down its private sales reports, publish most non-sales reports, and stop circulating competitively sensitive data. A court-appointed monitor will enforce it. For shoppers, the lesson is structural: in a category where five companies process nearly all the chicken, switching between brand-name and store-brand chicken breasts is a weak price lever, because the same handful of processors often supply both.

Strategy: In concentrated categories like chicken, pork, and turkey, shift buying toward whole birds, larger cuts, regional or cooperative processors, or direct-from-farm clubs. These routes sidestep the national processing tier where the coordination happened.

Source: California Attorney General →

NEWBORN VITAMIN K INJECTION

ProPublica documented a rising number of U.S. newborns dying or suffering permanent brain damage from VKDB (Vitamin K Deficiency Bleeding) — a condition the routine birth injection prevents. A JAMA study of more than 5 million births found the refusal rate hit 5% in 2024, a 77% jump since 2017. Some hospital systems now see one in five families decline the shot.

The biology is settled. Newborns are born with very low vitamin K because it doesn't cross the placenta well, and breast milk has only trace amounts. Without the injection, roughly 1 in 10,000–15,000 babies develops spontaneous internal bleeding, often in the brain. Infants who skip the shot are 81 times more likely to develop the late-onset form. The CDC and the AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) both classify the 0.5–1 mg intramuscular dose as high-evidence, low-risk. No serious adverse reactions are documented in the clinical literature.

The 'oral drops as a natural alternative' offered by some providers requires multiple doses on a strict schedule and fails more often against late-onset VKDB — a detail that tends to get left out of the online conversations driving the trend. The category error is treating a one-time preventive against a rare, irreversible outcome like a discretionary supplement.

Strategy: Before delivery, ask your OB, midwife, and pediatrician to walk through the evidence for each standard newborn intervention. Specifically ask the failure rate of oral versus intramuscular vitamin K for late-onset VKDB. A provider who can't cite the published numbers is giving you community consensus, not medical reasoning.

Source: ProPublica →