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Tequila, the Mexican hard liquor that’s become a bar staple, has its very own holiday to celebrate its crisp, earthy flavors. Today (Thursday, July 24) is National Tequila Day. Lets take a look at the history of the adult beverage so you can wow your coworkers at happy hour. Then we can explore some fun offers to celebrate the day. A shot or two of tequila history A forerunner to the modern hard liquor dates back to the Aztecs (and possibilty even earlier civilizations) in Mexico, as noted by Liquor.com. They fermented the sap of the agave plant to create a milky beverage called pulque and worshipped the husband-and-wife god duo behind this act, Mayahuel and Patecatl. The Spanish arrived in Mexico in 1517 and two years later began their conquest to take over. The soldiers missed brandy and began to experiment with mud stills and agave to replace it. Eventually the Marquis of Altamira took things a step further. He opened the first major distillery in the early 1600s in present-day Tequila, Jalisco. The Cuervo family took things commercial in 1758 with their own distillery. The Sauza family followed suit in 1873. It is believed that Don Cenobio Sauza first imported tequila to the United States in 1873. The alcohol was present at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The spirit also grew in popularity during Prohibition as it was easily smuggled into the country. The invention of the margarita in the 1940s further strengthened tequilas public relations. In 1974 Mexico declared tequila its intellectual property meaning it had to be made and aged in certain regions of the country. The Tequila Regulatory Council was formed 20 years later in part for quality control. What truly cemented tequilas legacy was when imported tequila shifted from mixto, a combination of a tequila from agave plants and other sugars, to a 100% agave tequila. Bartenders loved using these pure liquids to create even more yummy cocktails. Additionally, these smaller batched craft creations helped elevate the liquor, while the celebrity endorsements didnt hurt either. (Were looking at you, George Clooney and Casamigos.) These days, the United States is tequilas best customer. In 2024, almost 32.2 million 9-liter cases were sold, making it the best year ever for the spirit, according to Statista. How to celebrate National Tequila Day After that lengthy history lesson, you probably worked up a thirst and want to help the 2025 statistics. Below are a few deals to be had for National Tequila Day: Chili’s: Restaurant chain Chilis is here to help. It is offering $5 Tequila Trifectas. This cocktail contains three kinds of tequila: El Jimador Blanco, 1800 Reposado, and Jose Cuervo Gold. Chuy’s: Your local Chuy’s features Grande ‘Rita specials and $5 tequila shots. Margaritas Mexican Restaurant: The chain boasts $5 Don Julio Blanco shots and $7 Cadillac Margaritas made with Don JulioReposado. You can even get a $19.42 Don Julio1942 Margaritas that comes with a free Don Julio hat while supplies last. Hooters: Participating Hooters locations like the one in Brunswick, New Jersey, have $5 margaritas. Red Robin: If you are looking for something more family friendly, Red Robin always offers $4 margaritas during Happy Hour Monday through Friday from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. However you choose to celebrate, cheers!
Category:
E-Commerce
Tesla is speeding toward a head-on collision with the realities of the auto industry. Amid protests over CEO Elon Musks involvement with President Donald Trumps administration, not to mention Teslas stagnant model line and obsolete technology, the companys revenue for the first quarter of 2025 slid 9% year over year to $19.34 billion while global deliveries shrank 13%. The second quarter was equally dire: Tesla delivered just 384,122 cars, down 13% year over year, and took in $22.5 billion in revenue, 12% lower than the same period last year. Tesla sales have now been eclipsed by Chinas BYD for three consecutive quarters. But Musk wants Tesla fanboys not to worry. Instead of focusing on the companys declining sales figures, Musk spent most of his opening remarks on his recent earnings call talking about the enormous potential of the companys Robotaxi service and Optimus humanoid robots to make Teslaand its investorsvery, very rich. Those promises are still rather hollow. Teslas Robotaxi service, which arrived in Austin in June, is still an invite-only test limited to a small geofenced area. Competitor Waymo has more than 100 fully autonomous vehicles operating on the Uber platform in that city, covering a 90-square-mile area. Tesla covers a fraction of that in a zone shaped like a penis because Musk is a comedy genius. (“It’s going to get bigger and longer,” he told investors on his recent earnings call.) Its also full of dangerous glitches that reveal the limitations of Musks self-driving solution, which currently relies heavily on tele-operators to avoid fatal accidents. Weeks after the Tesla service launched, the city of Austin says the test remains limited to 10 to 20 Model Y cars, which look nothing like the actual Robotaxi design Musk originally presented to investors. Meanwhile, Google’s Waymo and Baidu’s Apollo Go autonomous cab services continue to expand across the planet, with thousands of cars already on the streets thanks to designs that combine AI brains with multiple optical, radar, and laser sensors. The other promisethe really big oneis Optimus, the humanoid robot that Musk has said could one day transform his company into a $25 trillion market-cap, world-dominating empire. In Musks vision, legions of 5-foot-8 electric androids running Teslas vehicle-grade AI will ferry battery cells, haul parts carts, and stack sheet-metal blanks across the companys gigafactories, taking on the dull, injury-prone chores no human wants. These bots, he has said, will be working on Tesla assembly lines by the end of 2025. Next year, theyll roam third-party warehouses and logistics hubs across North America. Within five years, Musk promises, Tesla will be making 1 million units per year. Within a decade, there could be 100 million of them in the wild as companies worldwide deploy them for stockroom restocking, parcel delivery, elder-care assistance, and other services. Conveniently, their sales would buoy Teslas share price just as its core EV lineup shows its vulnerabilities. Optimus has the potential to be north of $10 trillion in revenue, like its really bananas, Musk told investors in April. “It will be the biggest product ever,” he reiterated on the July 22 earnings call. Except, just like with Robotaxi, it doesnt look like thats working out as promised. At this point, it’s extremely hard to believe that Optimus will materialize in any meaningful way within the timeframe Musk anticipates. Its even harder to believe that the program can get off the ground quickly enough to compete with companies that appear to be further ahead in developing and deploying humanoid robotsespecially in China, where competitors have the advantage of fully dominating the supply chain to manufacture bots at scale. [Image: Tesla] Market analysts predict the entire humanoid robot market could reach $13 billion to $38 billion between 2030 and 2035 (making Musk’s claims of $10 trillion in annual revenue mathematically impossible, at least for the next decade). Meanwhile, the industry is still in its Macintosh era, according to Jeff Cardenas, CEO of Apptronik, which makes the Apollo 1 humanoid robot. This is like the early 1980s for personal computers, Cardenas told me recently. We’re in the early days. That means theres a chance for Tesla to catch up. But it also means theres a Mars-size gap between Musks $25 trillion robot revolution and the hard work of actually engineering it. ROBOT DREAMS MEET HARD REALITY Here is the Optimus reality today: Production reportedly froze in mid-June when the bots overheating joints, limp wrists, and batteries that croaked before lunchtime forced a complete procurement pause. By then, only about 1,000 bots had rolled off the Fremont, California, pilot line, costing around $60,000 apiece to make. According to videos of the bots working, they were moving at less than half the speed of the humans they are meant to replace. Optimuss problems have prompted a redesign to improve the robots performance. Tesla, according to reports, is evaluating new providers of all its key failing components, a process that will further delay an already delayed schedule. According to AInvest, two soures in the Optimus supply chain claim that “Tesla had procured enough parts to produce 1,200 Optimus units and had manufactured close to 1,000. Though Musk had claimed the company would produce 5,000 units in 2025, according to these sources, With the suspension of parts procurement, this target is now largely unattainable. (The Information confirmed the report.) On his Q2 earnings call, Musk said that Tesla is now working on an Optimus 3 prototype. We are gonna retool a bunch of things, so its gonna probably be prototypes of Optimus 3 [at the] end of this year and then scale production next year, he said. The rosary of failures may explain why Optimus’s program chief, Milan Kovac, bolted in June. Kovac left Tesla abruptly, citing family reasons (“I want to make it clear that this is the only reason,” he insisted on social media). The project is now in the hands of Tesla’s Autopilot boss, Ashok Elluswamy. Some old-design Optimus robots are currently in Tesla factories doing limited jobs. The company has shown the robots performing specific tasks, like folding a T-shirt and moving batteries at glacial speeds. Musk also recently reposted a video of an Optimus serving popcorn at the new Tesla Diner in Hollywood, though the clip is speeded up, giving the impression that the robot functions at a normal pace. The Jetsons-esque diner, which houses a Supercharger station, is a smokescreen, detonated the day before the company’s Q2 results and meant to distract from yet another empty promise: Musk hasnt yet delivered batteries that load as fast as gas pumps, so hes now inviting drivers to fill up on pancakes and burgers while waiting for their cars to charge. The popcorn-serving Optimus, meanwhile, is a prop used by the company to distract fans and investors. A MAGNET-SIZE PROBLEM Optimuss problems run deep, starting with the rare-earth magnets it needs to power its motors. Without the magnets, theres no way to make robots that can move with the speed and precision of real humans. While Tesla hasnt disclosed the number of magnets the Optimus requires, analyst Luke Lango says it may use up to 8 pounds of magnets. (A typical humanoid robot needs more than 40 servo motors, and each of those requires up to 3.5 ounces of magnets.) Back in March, Musk blamed Optimuss manufacturing problems on the lack of rare-earth magnets. Beijing had canceled exports when Musk’s former best buddy declared a trade war against China. In June, Chinas Ministry of Commerce resumed issuing permits for rare-earth magnet exports, putting them on a short leash while cracking down on smuggling. But this is a problem that is not going to be solved anytime soon, if ever. As long as geopolitical tensions exist, no Western company can fully rely on Chinese magnets. [Image: Tesla] The U.S. government is trying to stop Chinese dominance by investing in MP Materials, an American company that just built a small magnet supply chain thats still in its embryonic state. To make the millions of magnets that Musk needs for Optimus to succeed at scale, Tesla would have to put itself at the front of the line, ahead of everyone from carmakers to gadget peddlers, including Apple (which itself bought into the MP Materials pipe dream this month). Such a supply chain will be very hard to build and could disintegrate at any time. DESIGNED TO FAIL? Even ifand that is a Starship-size ifTesla manages to secure a steady supply chain to scale up production to the levels that Musk needs, Optimus’s design may be doomed from the start. Tesla is chasing the hardest form factor in robotics, humanoids, without lidar, which means its robots will encounter the same issues that plague the company’s Full Self-Driving mode and Robotaxi. While Musk claims that lidar is for losers, the exclusive use of regular cameras has proven insufficient to understand the world around cars, leading to accidents. (From 2019 to 2023, Tesla’s Autopilot was involved in 736 crashes, including 17 fatal ones. And thats without counting the near-misses and car bumper accidents.) It will be the same with robots, which is why many of Tesla’s rivals, including startups like Unitree and AgiBot, are leaning on proven sensor stacks. And even then, the humanoid form factor may not be right in some settings. Chris Walti, Tesla’s first Optimus lead, who left in 2022 to found the non-humanoid robotics startup Mytra, recently argued that human-shaped robots are “the wrong option for factory work” because the human form “evolved to escape wolves and bears, rather than perform repetitive industrial tasks, making it a suboptimal system. A Tesla Optimus robot scoops popcorn and gestures at customers during the opening of the Tesla Diner in Hollywood on July 21, 2025. [Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images] The reality today is that specialized, purpose-built automation consistently outperforms general-purpose humanoid robots in cost, reliability, and efficiency for industrial tasks. That makes Tesla’s approach both an expensive engineering exercise and one that may lack a viable business strategy. Unless Optimus mutates into something tougher, easier to make, and a lot cheaper (Unitrees model has a $16,000 price tag), its destined to remain a showroom tease for a long time. Apptroniks Cardenas is still bullish on humanoids, which he argues can one day be deployed to perform a multitude of tasks. (Most bots today are created for single purposes.) “My view is that the key thing for robotics to scale is versatility, he says, noting his belief that we will someday see humanoids everywhere in the world, both legged and wheeled. Investors seem to agree. Financing for the sector has been growing wildly, especially in China, where the humanoid robot industry is most advanced. There, total funding reached $4.4 billion as of July 2025, doubling the previous years high-water mark, according to data from ITjuzi, which tracks Chinas venture-capital market. On July 21, Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com unveiled investments in three Chinese robotics startups: Engine AI, LimX Dynamics, and Spirit AI. Meanwhile, Hangzhou-based Unitree reached unicorn status in June with a new funding round that valued it at more than $1.3 billion. Investors included Alibaba Group Holding and affiliate Ant Group; Tencent Holdings; China Mobile; carmaker Geely; and Jinqiu Capital, an investment firm founded by former ByteDance employees. Many of these Chinese companies are already lining up customers. Hong Kong-listed UBTech secured a $12.6 million purchase from state-owned car exporter MiEE (Shanghai) Automotive Technology, by far the largest deal in the humanoid industry. Unitree and AgiBot also struck deals with telecoms operator China Mobile, worth $6.4 million and $10.9 million, respectively. Unitree founder and CEO Wang Xingxing said the company’s annual revenue had surpassed $139.4 million. These deals are far from the trillions that Musk covets, but they are a clear signal that his company is behind. Three months ago, Musk promised an army of Optimus robots marching through Tesla factories by the end of the year. Looking at the current state of the project, his 100-million robot party is turning into the Fyre Festival of robotics.
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E-Commerce
A leader recently told me about her dilemma: Her top performer of four years was asking about advancement opportunities, but with frozen budgets and no open positions, she felt powerless to help. Sound familiar? This scenario plays out everywhere. High performers hit their stride, ask “What’s next?” and managers default to the same answer: promotion. When that’s not possible, both sides feel stuck. But here’s what most leaders miss: When employees ask about advancement, they’re often asking for something deeperto be seen, valued, and recognized for their contributions. For decades, organizations have made promotion the primary symbol of professional success. It’s become our go-to way of saying “your work matters.” But this creates problems when budgets freeze: managers feel powerless, and employees feel invisible. The solution isn’t finding more money for promotions. It’s separating recognition from title changes. The S Curve of Growth Framework Instead of thinking about career development as a ladder (up or nothing), I encourage leaders to think about it as a learning curvespecifically, what I call the S Curve of Growth. Every skill, project, or responsibility follows this predictable S-shaped pattern: Launch Point: You’re at the base of the S, where learning feels slow but you’re building crucial foundations. Sweet Spot: The steep middle of the S, where you gain confidence and competence. Progress feels exponential. Mastery: The top plateau of the S, where you’ve reached high performance but growth levels off. The S Curve of Growth gives you and your employees a shared language for career conversations. Instead of “I need a promotion,” the conversation becomes “I’m reaching mastery on my project management S Curvewhat new curve should I start climbing?” Making This Work in Practice The most effective leaders using this approach: Make development ongoing, not annual. Replace yearly reviews with regular check-ins. Ask employees where they see themselves on different learning curves and what support they need to progress. Let employees drive their growth. Using the S Curve framework, stop dictating development paths. Ask: “Which of your S Curves do you want to accelerate? What new curve interests you?” Then create opportunities around their answers. Recognize progress publicly. Acknowledge when someone moves from struggling with a new system to training others on it. Call out when they take on a challenging project. Make their growth visible. The Bottom Line Growth doesn’t require promotions. A software developer can master new programming languages, mentor junior colleagues, or lead cross-functional projectsall without a title change. A marketing manager can expand into data analytics, build vendor relationships, or develop content strategy expertise. When you help employees map their growth across multiple S Curves, you solve two problems: they feel recognized and engaged, and you build a more versatile, capable team. Everyone wins, even when the org chart stays frozen. The question isn’t whether you can afford to promote everyone. It’s whether you can afford to not help them grow.
Category:
E-Commerce
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