BUSINESS

As a consumer, there’s nothing worse than walking into a store and finding one of your favorites missing. It has happened to me countless times, when a beloved beverage, cereal, or another favorite gets discontinued.

It’s, however, a really good feeling when something that disappeared makes a comeback. Those are emotions that retail giants, including Coca-Cola and Pepsi, like to manipulate.

Coca-Cola has not been kind when it comes to getting rid of slower-selling flavors, even when they have a dedicated fanbase.

The most famous example of that is the company’s 2020 decision to stop making TaB, its first diet soda.

That inspired the SaveTaBSoda Committee, a group of fans of the diet beverage who want to force Coca-Cola to bring it back.

“We’re TaB drinkers on a mission to save our soda. The SaveTaBSoda Committee was formed in October 2020, shortly after the Coca-Cola Company announced the planned discontinuation of TaB soda,” the group shared on its website.

Coca-Cola has not given in, despite a protest at the company’s headquarters, a petition, and multiple other efforts to force the company to bring back the classic soda.

That doesn’t mean Coca-Cola never brings back a classic flavor. The company has two cult-favorite holiday sodas, and one of them was discontinued in 2021. Another was canceled in 2018, but a variation of it will make a 2026 return to shelves.

Coca-Cola Cinnamon is not coming back

Coca-Cola Cinnamon, introduced in 2019, was a limited-time offer for the Christmas season. The company trumpeted the flavor in a 2019 news release, which is no longer on the company’s website.

“Coca‑Cola also is spicing up the season with the limited-edition launch of Coca‑Cola Cinnamon, which blends the delicious taste of Coca‑Cola with a warm cinnamon flavor associated with the holidays,” the company wrote.

The company brought back Cinnamon Coke in 2020 but not in 2021. It has not returned since.

In 2023, Coca-Cola ignored a request from TheStreet for a comment on the fate of Coca-Cola Cinnamon.

Coca-Cola has discontinued many sodas over the years.Shutterstock

Coca-Cola brings back another holiday classic

In 2013, Coca-Cola introduced Sprite Cranberry for the holiday season.

“Both products take the refreshing taste of traditional Sprite and combine it with a splash of sweet and tart cranberry notes,” the company shared in a press release.

It was the first new Sprite flavor since Sprite Remix in 2005.

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“We’re incorporating one of the most popular flavors of the season with the No. 1 lemon-lime brand to celebrate the holidays,” Sprite Brands executive Kim Paige said at the time. “Over the years, our fans have increasingly demanded Sprite with cranberry flavor, and we’re excited to give it to them with the crisp, clear, caffeine-free, naturally flavored taste they already love about Sprite.”

That flavor was brought back every year seasonally until 2018, when it was discontinued. In 2019, however, Coca-Cola introduced a new take on the drink, Winter Spiced Cranberry.

“Coca-Cola changed the classic Sprite Cranberry — which had been a holiday staple for six years — to a new warm spice- and cranberry-flavored lemon-lime soda. The holiday Sprite became an immediate favorite,” Allrecipes reported.

While the new variant has appeared every year since the old one was killed, Coca-Cola had not commented on whether it will return this year. Several social media accounts that track beverage releases have, however, confirmed the return.

“Holiday soda season is coming very soon! Coca-Cola Holiday Creamy Vanilla and Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry are both set to return in mid-October 2026, including Zero Sugar options,” Snackwire reported.

All Things Hallows, which covers seasonal product releases, also reported on the return.

“Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry: The seasonal favorite returns in Original and Zero Sugar,” it shared on its Facebook page.

Kroger has added a page listing the returning Sprite, but it’s still showing as unavailable. Walmart also has a product listing, but it shows no stock.

Pepsi’s holiday classic can’t return

In 2023, Pepsi discontinued a holiday favorite by killing the entire brand it was part of.

PepsiCo dropped its entire Sierra Mist product line. That meant Sierra Mist Cranberry Splash was quietly killed as the company replaced Sierra Mist with Starry as its lemon-lime soda. 

It won’t prevent Pepsi from offering a seasonal flavor this winter, according to Sodaseekers, a top Instagram page covering the beverage industry.

“The newest Pepsi holiday innovation is almost here! The product images seen here came from an official database, confirming this release,” the Instagram page wrote next to pictures of Pepsi Vanilla & Cream, in full and Zero Sugar.

It will be released in October and is expected at all Pepsi retailers, the site reported.

Sporked also confirmed that Pepsi would be releasing a Vanilla & Cream flavor.

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Some businesses sell products that customers already understand. Others have to explain before they can explain why they’re the right choice.

Beyoncé’s “Morning Dew (Donk)” rises to No. 2 on the Rhythmic Airplay chart, leaving the superstar one spot from a thirteenth No. 1.

Don’t look now, but there are some technical reasons to believe that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was right when he declared to the financial markets that “I am the house now.”

The scary part of a 30-year mortgage is rarely the payment. It is the roof that wears out while the loan still has decades to run.

Michael Burry thinks Big Tech signed that kind of mortgage. In a Substack post on Thursday, September 24, 2026, the investor behind “The Big Short” said the write-offs could come in 2028 or 2029, when its AI commitments may be so large that “a relatively small write-off has a bigger impact than we can now imagine.”

He floated 2028 as his base case in August, Benzinga reported. While hyperscalers like Microsoft and Alphabet are deeply exposed, Oracle Corporation (ORCL) sits squarely in the crosshairs of that timeline.

Related: Oracle layoffs top 2,500 workers as AI spending surges

Burry’s date comes from the capital cycle

Net capital investment by S&P 500 companies, or capital spending minus depreciation, hit about 2.07% of GDP as of June 30, 2026, according to his post. Only the aftermath of the March 2000 Nasdaq peak ran higher in nearly four decades, he wrote.

After the dot-com buildout, depreciation and write-downs kept S&P 500 net investment negative for 12 straight quarters, from mid-2003 to mid-2006, Burry wrote.

Write-offs trail the peak in his framework, and he expects spending to keep climbing for a few more quarters.

Among the world’s most profitable companies, Burry spares only Apple Inc. (AAPL). The rest are “betting everything on this as their free cash flow turns negative,” he wrote, while their borrowing accelerates.

Money alone, he argued, buys no lasting edge. His other findings, per Stocktwits:

Uncommenced leases nearly tripled to over $300 billion at Microsoft Corporation (MSFT), by Burry’s count, as it stretched data center useful lives to 25 years. He argued both moves shrink reported capital spending.

Leases and purchase commitments rose 81% in nine months to about $267 billion at Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), by his math, while long-term debt doubled to $128.9 billion.

Roughly $700 billion in off-balance-sheet commitments sit at Meta Platforms Inc. (META), he estimated, backed by assets he says age faster than the telecom networks written down after 2000.

Nearly $900 billion in commitments and exposures sit at Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL), he estimated, including circular deals that fund AI firms buying its computing power.

Michael Burry sees hyperscaler write-offs arriving in 2028 or 2029, the same window in which Oracle’s Project Jupiter data center is due online.Mesut Dogan / Getty Images

Why Oracle stock carries the sharpest version of the risk

Oracle has turned from a database company into a landlord for AI computing, with $664 billion in contracted future revenue, according to CNBC. It also carries the most debt relative to earnings, about 4.3 times EBITDA versus under 1 times for the other four, according to Reuters.

Burry targets the $11.4 billion in customer prepayments with “a significant financing component” Oracle collected last quarter, its 10-Q shows.

Under accounting rule ASC 606, such early cash is treated like a customer loan, so Oracle books interest on it and later recognizes more revenue than it collected.

That lifts future cloud revenue by nearly 20%, he argued: “the extra $1.9 billion becomes extra revenue created by the structure of the contract.” The offsetting cost lands in interest expense, so it never touches the operating margin, which CFO Hilary Maxson called central to Oracle’s value.

In plain terms, treating prepayments as loans lets Oracle inflate reported future cloud growth while hiding the financing costs in interest expenses, keeping operational margins looking unnaturally clean.

Oracle argues its chips age well. GPUs renewed or resold last quarter went for a 20% premium even though most were four years or older, co-CEO Clay Magouyrk said. “We see a long useful life with increasing value,” he added.

Bulls, however, maintain that Burry underestimates persistent enterprise capacity shortages.

Wall Street consensus points to Oracle’s soaring backlog and GPU premium pricing as proof that real-world AI workload demand will absorb these capital costs well before 2028 maturities hit.

Oracle shares closed down 3.5% at $139.53 on September 24, 2026, according to The Motley Fool, as the cost of insuring its debt hit a record high. That sits below the $144.63 level where Burry disclosed an Oracle short position in August, so he profits if he is right.

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The 2028 bill may reach Oracle’s partners first

Oracle’s roughly $248 billion in data center leases, disclosed in December 2025, start in fiscal 2028 and run for 15 to 19 years. Its customer contracts typically last about five years, S&P Global Market Intelligence told CoStar. That is the mortgage and the roof.

At Project Jupiter, Oracle sent the Blue Owl Capital unit building its New Mexico campus a force majeure notice, which could allow Oracle to delay payments if the site misses its 2028 start, Bloomberg reported.

Oracle said the project “remains on our planned schedule,” TechCrunch reported, but Blue Owl shares fell 4%.

About $18 billion in Project Jupiter loans were quoted at 89 to 91 cents on the dollar, Reuters reported, citing the Financial Times.

Magouyrk says Oracle’s growth capital need not all be Oracle’s own. Burry’s $3 trillion tally counts where it comes from instead: leases, guarantees and special-purpose vehicles.

In the dot-com bust, Burry cites the damage that surfaced as write-downs. This time, the first warnings may be force majeure letters, stressed loans and delayed payments, well before any hyperscaler books a loss. Oracle’s October investor day is the next checkpoint.

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Artificial intelligence is generating a new cybersecurity dilemma. Companies increasingly need to govern not only who can access their systems, but also which AI agents may access them and what those agents can do once they’re inside.

That might be a big opportunity for Okta (OKTA), according to Bank of America Securities.

Okta’s Oktane 2026 conference led BofA analyst Tal Liani to lift his price target on the stock to $220 from $200, according to a Sept. 24 research note emailed to TheStreet.

The analyst kept the Neutral rating but pointed out the disconnect between the promise of Okta’s AI approach and how little it’s really doing for the firm now.

Okta used its annual conference to cast itself as an identity-security control layer for AI bots. Among the developments BofA called out were free Agent SSO, Shadow AI Agent Discovery, Agent Gateway, and Agent-to-Agent Connections.

Those technologies might help Okta go beyond standard authentication and into governance and security rules for what autonomous artificial intelligence systems can access and do, BofA said.

The opportunity that may arise later could be substantial.

The management message at the conference indicates that what Okta calls “Agentic Identity” might represent a larger total addressable market than identity security currently is, BofA said.

But investors may have to wait for that chance to make a significant difference in Okta’s financial outcomes.

Bank of America sees a bigger AI opportunity for Okta

BofA raises Okta’s price target, citing improved confidence in its AI potential, not a material shift in the near-term profits forecast.

The $220 price target is based on a 12 times expected calendar 2027 enterprise value-to-sales multiple for Okta, up from 11 times before, Liani said.

The higher multiple is a better reflection of the improvements in Okta’s narrative post-Oktane, the analyst added.

But BofA framed the conference as building on early momentum, not as anything that alters its investment thesis. The business thus kept its rating at Neutral, but lifted its price target.

At the heart of that possibility is a rather straightforward dilemma caused by more autonomous A.I. systems.

AI agents must have identity.

Those identities need permits. Companies need to know who agents may access, detect agents that are running without authority, terminate access when appropriate, and prevent hacked or deactivated agents from continuing to utilize credentials.

Okta wants its platform to be between the agents and the apps they utilize.

Agent SSO is a major component of that plan. BofA said it’s offered at no extra cost inside Okta’s basic single sign-on solution.

Agent SSO may offer agents a unique identity and short-lived tokens instead of using long-lived application programming interface keys.

The decision to open out the authentication component generally isn’t about making money from it immediately. It’s an issue of distribution.

“Free Agent SSO seeds the upsell,” BofA said.

BofA thinks free Agent SSO may lead organizations and software developers to embrace Okta’s agent identity standards and create a funnel for premium goods across discovery, governance, and runtime security.

The economics might get a lot more fascinating in those compensated skills.

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BofA said Okta for AI Agents has features including Shadow AI Agent Discovery, Agent-to-Agent Connections, lifecycle governance, and Agent Gateway.

The paper notes planned features such as visual mapping of permissions between agents and resources and a “kill switch” that would deny requests made with tokens still in an agent’s possession after the agent is deactivated.

That difference is significant for BofA, since it takes Okta beyond just certifying an AI agent.

It may give the company a hand in restricting what the agent can really perform.

Okta is making a surprising bet on the AI agent boom.Bloomberg / Getty Images

Okta could reach customers that use rival identity platforms

One of the most crucial portions of Okta’s AI approach might include clients that don’t use Okta as their main workforce identity supplier.

BofA cited Okta’s commitment to embrace third-party identity suppliers as a particularly noteworthy step.

That implies companies might use Okta’s AI-agent security products, even if another vendor is managing their core employee identification infrastructure.

That approach is extremely essential to Microsoft.

Microsoft accounts for nearly 40% of the market, according to the BofA analysis. By supporting third-party identity systems, Okta has the option to target Microsoft-centric clients without forcing them to tear out their current identity infrastructure first.

That alters the possible sales pitch quite a bit. It could offer adjacent AI-agent solutions such as governance, privileged access, and runtime detection, rather than needing to persuade a corporation to migrate its primary identity system to Okta.

Ultimately, BofA believes Okta must be a trusted identity-intelligence layer spanning both Okta clients and enterprises with various identity systems.

The AI-agent possibilities may also go beyond workers. BofA cited Okta’s Auth0 business as another area where it may develop as companies continue to roll out customer-facing AI agents.

Okta’s AI Identity for Commerce is designed to help companies manage transactions originating from proprietary and third-party AI assistants. Simultaneously, the Auth for Universal Commerce Protocol is meant to allow agents to identify items, generate shopping carts, and make transactions on behalf of users, the note said.

That might open up prospective consumers for Okta inside a company beyond the conventional IT and cybersecurity departments to product, engineering, digital, and customer-experience teams.

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BofA warned that the customer-facing standards and implementation are still early. Still, customer-facing AI agents remain a possible key future driver of corporate AI adoption, the analyst said.

The big picture is that every task you add to autonomous software is another identity that organizations may someday have to manage and safeguard.

If it occurs at scale, identity security might become a key infrastructure layer underpinning the agentic AI economy.

Okta’s AI economics show promise, but it’s still early

The main reason BofA isn’t becoming more optimistic on Okta right now is simple: The potential is far easier to perceive than the financial effect.

Okta for AI agents is charged per user today, since most installations are still tied to employee processes, BofA said. As agents grow more autonomous, the analyst anticipates that the price structure will change.

Early deals do provide some glimpse into what AI agents may potentially imply for Okta clients, however. In a few of large agreements addressed at Oktane, BofA noted, expenditure on AI-agent products totaled about $1 to $1.50 for every roughly $4 spent on the larger Okta platform.

That kind of incremental expenditure might be meaningful, but BofA noted specifically that the sample is too small to derive a normalized attach rate.

So the bank’s broader takeaway from Oktane is somewhat positive but cautious.

Free Agent SSO may assist in driving adoption. The proposed monetization layer with lifecycle governance and runtime enforcement is Okta for AI Agents. Okta’s other solutions would then be able to capture the associated demand for governance, privileged access, and threat response.

That framework supported BofA raising its price target to $220 from $200, although it wasn’t enough to prompt it to elevate Okta from Neutral.

The moves do not have a major impact on BofA’s near-term financial forecast, it added. The AI-agent potential will be obvious in fiscal 2028 rather than now, the analyst said.

That’s what distinguishes Okta’s AI narrative from just adding another generative-AI capability to an existing software product.

The company’s bigger bet is that autonomous agents will be yet another type of digital identity that companies need to identify, validate, regulate, and maybe even shut down. This could mean a much larger number of identities that enterprises will have to safeguard.

BofA sees enough upside in that scenario to value Okta more highly. For now, however, it still needs more proof before it can be positive on the stock.

Related: Wall Street panicked over AI. Then came an 8-figure cybersecurity twist

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Why we love this deal

Hoop earrings aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but for accessory lovers who love the rounded look, there are so many great styles to choose from. When you think of a hoop earring, you might picture a larger, statement piece of an accessory, but there are lots of smaller, thinner styles that might fit your everyday wardrobe a bit better, and the Apsvo 4-Pack Hoop Earrings is a great example of that.

They’re on the smaller size and yet they still have a lot of shine and sparkle to offer. Not only that, with a multi-pack like the Apsvo 4-Pack Hoop Earrings, you get four earrings for the price of one, and now with a Walmart Flash deal, you can get those four pairs for even cheaper than you typically could.

The Apsvo 4-Pack Hoop Earrings originally retail for $116, but during this limited-time sale you can get them up to 87% off. Save $101 and get the four-pack for just $15 during this temporary deal. 

Apsvo 4-Pack Hoop Earrings, $15 (was $116) at Walmart

Courtesy of Walmart

Shop at Walmart

Why do shoppers love it?

Apsvo sells a variety of earrings in multi-packs, but this four-pack of hoop earrings features hoops in four distinctly different sizes to give you options when you’re styling an outfit. Measuring 9 millimeters, 11 millimeters, 14 millimeters, and 16 millimeters, you can swap out the different sizes for different looks, or even wear multiple pairs at once if you have a few piercings in your ear.

The earrings all have a copper base with an 18K white gold plating. This combination creates a very durable, sturdy base with a more eye-catching and appealing silver-colored shine that prevents tarnishing or color deterioration. The hoop earrings feature a band of circular cubic zirconia stones which run the entire length of the earring from the front to the back closure. As a “huggie hoop” the earring closely hugs the lobe. Other hoops typically have a bit of space between the post and the earring itself. 

And speaking of the post, what’s unique about it is that it’s made from S925 sterling silver, which offers durability and makes it a safe choice for sensitive skin. While copper and the white gold plating can’t be guaranteed to be 100% nickel or lead-free, sterling silver is.  It’s also resistant to bending and breaking so it won’t wear over time even if you choose to wear the earrings on a daily basis. 

Related: Walmart’s $18 Swarovski rose earrings come in three shades of gold

The hoops have a classic latchback closure, which provides a very secure but comfortable fit. The earrings come in a lovely box, making them perfect for gifting purposes. 

Details to know

Material: Cubic zirconia, copper, 18K white gold plating, and sterling silver.

Dimensions: The earrings measure 9 millimeters, 11 millimeters, 14 millimeters, and 16 millimeters in diameter. 

Closure: Latchback.  

These hoops hit high marks across the board with shoppers. Folks find them so comfortable they sleep in them — although we advise taking them off when bathing or sleeping to preserve their quality. Nevertheless, the closure is secure and also comfortable, with no poking or prodding, and they don’t tarnish or become discolored. “Well made with a high-quality appearance,” one shopper said. “Very happy and they look fantastic,” another chimed in. 

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When you want to accessorize but don’t want something over the top, the Apsvo 4-Pack Hoop Earrings is the perfect purchase to have on hand.