Cheddar

Trick-or-treat math is getting harder🍫🎃 FinanceBuzz tracked full-price bulk bags of mixed Halloween candy at Walmart, Target, Kroger and Albertsons every year since 2021. A 100-piece bag that averaged $9.91 in 2021 now averages $16.96, a rise more than triple the 22% national inflation rate over the same stretch. Most of the jump came recently: the bag rose $2.45 from 2023 to 2024 and $2.34 from 2024 to 2025. This year’s increase was smaller, about 57 cents, or 3.5%. Are you cutting back on candy this year?

Restaurants built DoorDash. Now it’s paying for your weekly grocery run. 🛒🥑 Instacart, founded in 2012 and public since 2023, rode the pandemic delivery boom but has since lost ground as DoorDash and Uber Eats moved into groceries. Uber also held talks at one point to buy Instacart. What changes for customers? DoorDash says DashPass and Instacart+ members would pay one membership fee instead of two, an estimated $100 million a year in savings, and Instacart users could shop more than 50,000 additional stores. DoorDash also sees a multi-year path to $500 million or more in annual synergies. DoorDash plans to fund the cash with cash on hand and debt, backed by a JPMorgan bridge loan, and holders of about 19% of Instacart’s shares have already agreed to vote yes. Open questions remain: Instacart delivers for Walmart, which DoorDash stopped serving in 2022. Wedbush analysts warned that looking at the online market more narrowly “can make approvals more challenging.” It’s DoorDash’s latest deal after buying Deliveroo and SevenRooms, as the delivery business keeps consolidating and Amazon and Walmart push faster grocery delivery.

The Fed hit pause, but it didn’t sound relaxed about it🏦 The central bank held its benchmark rate at 3.75%–4% on Wednesday, a month after its first hike since 2023. Fed Governor Lisa Cook and Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack dissented in favor of another quarter-point increase. It was Cook’s first dissent since joining the Fed in 2022, and it comes after President Trump tried to remove her. The Fed upgraded its read on the economy to “expanding at a strong pace,” but Chair Kevin Warsh said “inflation is too high,” with energy prices climbing again. Asked about next week’s midterms, he said: “Politics played no role in the decision.” The other big news, is starting in 2027, one of the Fed’s eight meetings will cover strategy only, with no rate vote. In 2028 that becomes two. Markets still see a strong chance of a hike in December. The 2-year Treasury yield slipped to about 4.71% while the 10-year rose to about 5.04%.

And the award for the biggest known donor of the 2026 midterms goes to…💸 The Washington Post counts $446 million of his own money in this cycle, according to filings through Oct. 23. That’s already well past the roughly $290 million he spent in 2024 to help elect President Trump and Republicans. Most of it is going to keep Congress in GOP hands. The Senate Leadership Fund, the main super PAC backing Republican Senate candidates, has received $168 million from him this cycle. The Congressional Leadership Fund, its House counterpart, has received $30 million. His America PAC says the money gives Republicans “a fighting chance to defy history.” Democrats see it differently: “Republicans are hoping to buy these elections,” a Senate Majority PAC spokesperson Lauren French said. With days to go before Election Day, the spending may not be done.

The cleaning robot has a human at the controls🤖 Tau Robotics runs what it calls the world's only humanoid cleaning service, and it's live now in San Francisco, invite-only. Staff drop the robots off, usually two per visit. A trained operator then steers them in real time from Tau's facility, through the robots' cameras, with AI handling some tasks. They vacuum, mop, wipe counters and clean toilets. It costs $50 per robot per hour, so a standard one-hour clean with two robots runs $100. The average San Francisco house cleaning costs about $85 an hour, according to Angi. There's a catch. Every visit is recorded, and Tau keeps the footage to train the AI it hopes will one day do the job without a person. Would you let a remote-controlled robot clean your home?

Flying cars are getting their start on a racetrack🚗🏁 Airspeeder co-founder Jack Withinshaw says racing is how the car took off 120 years ago, and it’s now where flying-car tech gets tested: collision avoidance, 5G networks, cybersecurity. Would you watch flying cars race?

Kung Fu stunts, lifting cars, mall cop, what doesn’t this robot do?🤖 Unitree just unveiled the H2-X “Kung Fu Legend Guardian,” a humanoid robot it’s pitching for security and rescue work. In the promo video, it kicks in car doors, flips off a car roof and jumps from a platform marked 13 foot. In staged scenes, it steps between a woman and a knife-wielding intruder and lifts the front of a car in a mock rescue. Unitree says the clip is real footage with no speed-up. The one spec Unitree gave is about 8 hours of endurance, which the fine print calls standing time. There’s no price, no spec sheet and no word on how much of the demo was autonomous.

Jensen Huang and a flock of robot ducks. 🦆 The keynote took place at Berlin’s Tempodrom, as Huang pitched Europe on building its own AI economy. The stars of the closing demo were Microducks, 9 inch robots from Hugging Face’s robotics team, Pollen Robotics. These tiny robots can walk, balance, sit, stand, kick a ball, roller-skate, pick things up with their beaks and get back up after a fall. They learned those skills in simulation with NVIDIA Isaac Sim that was trained in the cloud, and were tested on a laptop-sized RTX Spark before running on the real robot. As impressive as they are, they’re not flawless. Three fell over when told to “take a nap,” only two did the somersault, and one needed a stern “pay attention, stay focused.” Despite that, the $399 duck sold over 10,000 units within days of launch in August of this year.

The wearable robot is both a walking assistant and a fitness tool🏃‍♂️ Cheddar News’ Justine Miller tried the HyperShell Halo exoskeleton at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. The wearable straps to the hips and legs on a lightweight carbon fiber frame. It isn’t a medical device. It has three modes: eco adds “a little bit of a pep in your step,” hyper is built to “really boost you a lot,” and fitness flips it, making walking harder. The Halo costs $2,300 and is available for pre-order now, with shipping in January.

The biggest IPO in history is happening👀 The AI company behind Claude filed confidentially with the SEC in June. A public filing would clear the way for a possible November listing, and it would give investors their first full look at the company’s finances and risks. The numbers are huge on both sides. Anthropic brought in $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026 and posted a net loss of more than $80 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Financial Times reports third-quarter revenue rose to $16.8 billion, from $11.5 billion in the second quarter. Wall Street expects a raise of up to $100 billion at a $2 trillion valuation, according to Reuters, which would top SpaceX’s June IPO.