It's not exactly a well-established expression, but the meaning is reasonably transparent.
Here's an online article from 2005 which I think makes it clear "mailbox" can be seen as metaphorical. Essentially, it just means income (often sporadic, relatively small amounts from many different people) that keeps arriving long after you did something.
It's very much a "how to make money on the Internet" sort of term. I don't think a musician, say, who periodically receives royalty money from something he recorded decades ago, would call it "mailbox money".
A plausible context would be where you create a website that becomes popular, and sell advertising space on it. Assuming people keep going to your website, you should keep getting payments from the advertisers. But as you can imagine, in practice it's probably not as simple or as lucrative as it might seem. Most likely the only person getting rich is the guy who persuaded you to send him $10 for his book explaining how to create a popular website.
TL;DR: "Mailbox money" is an Internet marketing myth.
I was able to find a few instances of computer and car products being described as brutal:
one here:
Asrock 970 Pro3 promises brutal performance with 8-core AMD CPUs.
and another here:
The Mazda 6 MPS is a more refined, larger car that offers more space and luxury together with the brutal performance of it's [sic] turbocharged engine.
I'll point out that I had to wade through some irrelevant content (much of it using brutal with a negative connotation) in order to find these. You will also notice that these examples are not from major marketing campaigns. I also searched YouTube for "brutal performance" and got lots of hits for loud cars (most of the results were for rock music videos).
The intended meaning of brutal in these instances is probably some combination of strong and rugged, or perhaps even manly or interested more in power than the feelings of others. How it is actually interpreted will vary from person to person, but some people will probably receive a negative feeling from the word (I am reminded of a list of adjectives in Hobbes' Leviathan, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short").
As for whether it is okay to use the word in marketing, that all depends on the image that you want to put forward. Sometimes a company is okay with being seen as focused on raw power rather than on other positive attributes (perhaps to attract customers who think, "I don't care if my engine is quiet, as long as it's fast!") In that case, I would say brutal is just fine to use.
Other words (possibly with different connotations) that might appear in similar marketing outlets are:
- savage
- beastly
- unrestrained
- rugged
- powerful
Best Answer
I take it to mean that regardless of how the bike does in a race, it is so cheap (given their limited budget) that they've benefited by saving money, and are 'ahead' in that respect.
Charlie Brown is always depressed, and his friends often try to help him look on the bright side with such types of optimism (among the bouts of torment delivered, too.)