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Planet Money

There's no business like dough business

6/3/202627 min

Have you ever walked around a street, mall, or airport and noticed two or three of the same franchise restaurant within walking distance? Why might one Starbucks or McDonald’s or Wetzel’s Pretzels sometimes be built so close to another? Are they friends or competitors? And how can that possibly be profitable?

Today’s show is one such example. Our pals at Hyperfixed got a knotty question we just had to help them untangle: Why are there so many Wetzel’s Pretzels so close to one another at the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center Station?

To find out, Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi followed the dough all the way to the top. His journey led him to a jolly pretzel executive, a franchisee with a deep-fried American dream, and a brush with mall security.

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This episode was hosted by Alex Goldman and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. Hyperfixed is produced and edited by Emma Courtland, Amor Yates, Sari Soffer Sukenik and Tori Dominguez Peak.  The music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and Alex Goldman. It was engineered by Tony Williams. Fact checking by Naomi Barr. The Planet Money version was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and edited by Jess Jiang. It was engineered by Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money*’s executive producer.* 

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Clips

Pretzel Impulse: Smell-Based Attrition
Why Five Stores One Mall
Three Wetzel's, One Minute Walk
No Escaping That Pretzel Smell
Counting Feet With A Clicker

Transcript preview

First 90 seconds

  1. Speaker 10:00

    This message comes from MS Now. AI is moving fast. What's real? What's hype? And where is it all headed? On Why Is This Happening?, Chris Hayes talks with the leading experts to make sense of it. The AI Endgame, a special series from MS Now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

  2. Alex Goldman· Host0:17

    This is Planet Money from NPR.

  3. Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi· Host0:21

    A few months back, Planet Money got a little economic bat signal from our friends over at the podcast Hyperfixed. Hyperfixed is hosted by one of my longtime favorite radioheads, Alex Goldman. He was previously one of the hosts of Reply All. And for each episode, Hyperfixed takes on listener problems, big and small, and sets out to solve them.

  4. Alex Goldman· Host0:44

    Yeah. We get questions as small as, a listener said, "Hey, my favorite bakery shut down, and now I can no longer get the cake that I love." So we got Claire Saffitz, baker extraordinaire, to help us figure out the recipe.

  5. Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi· Host0:55

    Love that question.

  6. Alex Goldman· Host0:56

    And we also get questions like, "Should I have children?" Which, as you might imagine, is a more difficult question to answer.

  7. Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi· Host1:02

    Yeah, that's a, that's a bigger, scarier one. [laughs] But thank you for, thank you for looking into it.

  8. Alex Goldman· Host1:08

    Uh, yeah, I do my best. But the question that made us think of you guys was from a listener named Jed Kronfeld, because he wanted to talk about his local subway stop.

  9. Jed Kronfeld· Guest1:16

    To call it just a subway station, it, it's underplaying it a little bit.

  10. Alex Goldman· Host1:21

    Jed's lived in Brooklyn for the last five years, and the question on his mind had to do with the Atlantic Avenue Barclays Center Station.

  11. Jed Kronfeld· Guest1:28

    It connects, like, 9 or 10 different

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