Marketplace - Heavy on celebrity, light on social commentary

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

It's a big week for major televised events: The Winter Olympics kick off Wednesday and Super Bowl Sunday is nigh. Brands used to save their biggest, splashiest ad for such a slot. But this year, firms are pulling out all the stops to avoid controversy, or so much as hinting at a current event. Plus: Disney shows CEO selection is tricky business, PepsiCo announces price cuts on key salty snacks, and retail construction booms in Texas.Every story has an economic angle. Want some in your inbox? Subscribe to our daily or weekly newsletter.Marketplace is more than a radio show. Check out our original reporting and financial literacy content at marketplace.org — and consider making an investment in our future.

Chapter 1, corporate news. Chapter 2, financial insecurity. Chapter 3, hey, let's run away and join a band, huh? From American public media. This is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdahl. It is Tuesday. Today, this one is the 3rd of February.

Good as always. Have you along, everybody. This is a day ripe in news of the corporate variety, and you will be forgiven if you're thinking you've heard our lead story before. Disney's CEO, Bob Iger, has decided he's going to step down again. Yes, this would indeed be Iger's second retirement in the past six-ish years. He came back from the first one in 2022, but, you know, bygones. Josh DeMorrow is the new guy.

Been with the company 28 years, most recently running the company's theme parks, whence, as we mentioned yesterday, most of Disney's profits come. Point is, though, the House of Mouse is in a long line of companies, nonprofits even big league sports franchises that have stumbled when leadership tries to pass the baton. Marketplace is Stephanie Hughes gets us going with why succession is so hard. Choosing a CEO has higher stakes than almost any other decision of companies directors will ever make. But boards don't get the chance to do it that often because good leaders tend to stay put. It's not uncommon to see ten years upwards of ten, fifteen, getting to three,

20 years. Yo Jed Cheng is a professor of business administration at the University of Virginia. She says when succession planning is done well, a board gets to know people at the company who could become their next leader. So that could be having dinners with executives around board meetings. It could be having individuals in the firm to come in to do presentations with the board. You want to have someone who's ready to take on the role when it's time. But Chang says you don't want to anoint them too soon. If everyone in the firm sees like, okay, this is the The next person, oftentimes talented people will leave. And go try to be a CEO somewhere else.

Another potential stumbling block? When the current CEO gets a little too involved with the process. Deb Rubin is a senior partner at the leadership consulting firm, R.HR. It is hard for a CEO to be completely objective about the next phase and who should be there and what their own shadow has been in the organization. And so they are an important input, but they should not be the first. primary driver. Rubin says the board needs to think about choosing a leader, not just for the company that exists now, but for the company that will exist in the future. There's a tendency to want to

hire a clone if the last CEO has been tremendously successful, and to hire the opposite if a CEO has basically failed. And the reality is it's somewhere in between. The day that a new CEO takes charge, the company should start planning for its next one, says Anthony Nyberg, who leads the Center for executive succession at the University of South Carolina. But he says the boards he talks to tend to put off those discussions. Because we're human, it's hard to have conversations with people about your successor. They often don't want to think about when their end might be. A CEO's identity is intertwined with that of the firm, says UVA's Yo-Jed Cheng. So you're not just choosing a good leader. You're choosing the next face of the company. I'm Stephanie Hughes from

marketplace. Disney shares down just to hear today about two tenths percent. More broadly, big tech took a bit of a whacking. We will have the details when we do the numbers. Corporate story number two comes to us from the food and beverage aisle by way of the snack counter. PepsiCo reported profits this morning. Did quite fine thanks, beat expectations even as it has been selling fewer drinks and snacks in North America. The company's been getting some pressure from some of its big investors to turn things around, which is going to be no mean feed as shoppers are becoming both more cost-conscious and more health-conscious. Marketplaces Daniel Ackerman has more on this modern Pepsi challenge. The name PepsiCo might call to mind a bottle of cola, but many of the company's products

are actually salty snacks, says Errol Schweitzer, publisher of the checkout grocery update. They control more than 50% market share in packaged snacks in many major metro areas. That's largely through Pepsi's ownership. ship of Frito-Lay. You know, Doritos, Cheetos, Fritos, Tustitos. But even with the delightful rhymes, the snacks haven't been selling all that well. There are two big reasons for that, says Peter Galbo, an analyst with Bank of America. The first?

It's about affordability. Pepsi raised its snack prices during the pandemic when a lot of people were at home, apparently snacking. But now, with food inflation elevated, Galbo says consumers are less willing to spend on chips and pretzels. The company announced its slashing prices by 30. 15% on some of its snacks, effective this week. The timing is not coincidental to this being, you know, the largest snack holiday.

A snack holiday, also known as the Super Bowl. Pepsi wants to make sure fans stock up on its products before the game. Pepsi is also trying to boost sales by positioning its brands as healthy, says Errol Schweitzer, or at least healthier. They're looking at selling a Doritos with enhanced protein because everybody's obsessed with protein these days. He says some of the changes are marketing more than anything else. If you look at their packaging, they're advertising like a product like Lays is minimally processed as healthier or all-natural without really doing much to actually change the product.

Plain old potato chips are basically just potatoes, oil, and salt. And when it comes to PepsiCo's flagship cola, well, Dwayne Stanford, publisher of Beverage Digest, says... They have been lagging behind in recent years, Coca-Cola. Stanford says to address its arch rival, Pepsi will be airing an ad during the Super Bowl, featuring a taste test done by a polar bear. Of course, it's Coca-Cola's iconic polar bear, and it chooses Pepsi. Stanford says the drinks in the ad are the zero-sugar varieties, a sign, perhaps, of where Pepsi sees its consumers shifting.

I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace. Continuing with a theme here, don't look now, but the biggest advertising weekend of the year is straight ahead. live event double whammy. The Winter Olympics start tomorrow. Curling's up first, if you're curious, underrated, if you ask me. The opening ceremony is on Friday, then the Super Bowl on Sunday, both as it happens on NBC. The network gets a chance to make back the zillions of dollars is spent on the broadcast rights. Brands get a huge marketing opportunity as they try to move product and services at a tricky time economically and politically. Marketplace is Kristen Schwab,

has more now on the tone and tenor of ads in this day and age. This year, Super Bowl commercials will be full of famous names. Kendall Jenner for Fanatic Sportsbook, Sabrina Carpenter, for Pringles, Andy Sandberg for Helmonds. And there's a reason for that. Taking aside and making a big stand about what you stand for is very, very difficult at this moment.

Sean McBride is Chief Creative Officer at Arnold, a global ad agency. And we don't quite know what to do. And so I think it seems like people have settled on OK Celebrity. Traditionally, advertisers have settled on patriotism, but nothing's really safe these days. It's why Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern, says we might see more traditional ads, a bit of a blunt, hey, we make this great thing. You should buy it. We will see advertisers, by and large, stay very close to the product. Hawkins says more than usual, we're also seeing brands run commercials early right now, before the big events.

If you have a problem in your Super Bowl ad, it is much better to learn about it before the game, rather than after the game when you just showed it to 100 million people or more. About 130 million people last year, actually, a record. Their Y brands are paying as much as $10 million for 30 seconds of airtime this year. Ross Benish, a senior analyst at e-marketer, says as viewing habits have become more fragmented, live events have become more important for advertisers. whether like you're watching in California or in New York or wherever, you got everyone experiencing the same ad at the same time. Which is sort of the opposite of what advertising is these days, tailored and targeted. I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace.

One of the constants in this economy right now, and for a while now actually, has been that things aren't constant. They're volatile a lot of the time, uncertain more often than not. inflation, whatever the president's going to do, the labor market. We talk about that stuff a lot. Less covered, though, is the uncertainty a lot of families are feeling about their own economies on pretty much an everyday basis. It's a well-trod statistic, but it fits here that according to the Federal Reserve, fully a third of adults in this economy say they could not cover a $400 emergency expense using cash.

One of the groups trying to solve that problem or ameliorated as best they can is a nonprofit called Canary. Rachel Schneider is the founder and CEO. Welcome to the program. Thanks so much. I'm glad to be here. For those uninitiated among us, what is Canary? What does it do and how does it work? Sure. So Canary is a company that helps to facilitate charitable grants to individuals when they experience a crisis. So we help facilitate individuals and companies making donations that are especially for the purpose of helping people when they experience a financial crisis. And then on the other end of it, we help identify people who experience a crisis and direct that money to them.

There are companies, though, that do have these funds set up, that kind of do what you do, right? Absolutely. I'd love to say I thought of this idea, but I'm not that creative. In fact, you know, large companies across the U.S. often have a fund like this in place set up to enable them to help employees when they have a crisis. The reason I found a Canary was I wanted to make that practice much more available. to a wider range of companies. We should say here, I should say here, full disclosure,

that we've had you on the program before. It was then eight, nine-ish years ago. Honestly, I kind of forget. But you had worked on a book. You had done research for a book and co-written a book called The Financial Diaries in which you gain some insight into sort of this mirage of economic stability

that people have. Yeah, exactly. And what that book was about to a great extent. So what we did is I worked with a professor at NYU named Jonathan Mordock. and we set up a research team all across the country that gathered really detailed information from working families over the course of a full year. And it was that full year of information that made this study so unusual because we got to see the ups and downs that people experience

from week to week. And so when you think about the financial advice that's out in the world, it assumes a basic level of stability, right? You get told to budget by taking your monthly income and then subtracting the monthly fixed expenses that you will always have, right, your rent, your car, your insurance. And then from there you're supposed to say, okay, this is the amount I have left. That's discretionary. But what we actually saw was much more volatility, right? People who, to say, estimate three months from now how much you're going to earn in that month is just unrealistic. Because about half of Americans work hourly jobs, which means that they make a little bit different amount of money every week, depending on

if they're given 30 hours a week that week or 45 hours a week that week. And also, and this is important, I think, these grants that Canary is able to give are not huge. I mean, $1,000 is a lot of money, but in the grand scheme of things, a thousand dollars goes a very long way and is not that much money. It's true. And, you know, when we were doing that research, the economic jargon is to say, usefully large lump sum. Sorry, usefully large? That's interesting. I hadn't heard that.

Yeah, and Canary is really based on the idea that it is different to get $1,000 once and be able to buy a washer dryer or fix your tires on your car than it is to get an extra $2 in your paycheck for a certain number of hours. Right, right. There is a phrase that I came across while reading up on you and this company that struck me and maybe is a good way to go out. what you are doing here is to borrow a phrase from both you and the healthcare industry, you are doing palliative care. You're not fixing the structural problems. I think that's fair. And I think about it that way sometimes too. Palliative care is about providing a bit of relief, right? What we do is emergency relief funds. That would have been a quicker way to answer. Well, what does Canary do? Canary provides emergency relief funds to people in a moment of crisis. And those moments,

are life-changing for people. So that palliative care, right, it sounds like a Band-Aid, but that Band-Aid is what tied somebody over while they figure out the next big step. Rachel Schneider is the CEO, also the founder of Canary. Rachel, thanks for your time. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for reminding me. Coming up. Still away on a bunk and do rigging for Alter Bridge. Living the dream. But first, let's do the numbers. Now industrial is down 166 today, about a third and one percent. Closed at 49,240 did the blue chips. The NASDAQ gave up 336 points.

That is 1.4%, 23,255. The S&P 500 dropped 58 points, about 8 tenth percent, 69 and 17. PayPal plummeted today's company reported lower than expected earnings and, oh, by the buy, ousted its CEO. Analysts say the payment app is popular with people on the lower end of the income scale who've had less purchasing power in this K-shaped economy, as we've talked about. PayPal tanked 20% block. The app formerly known as Square dropped 6% Shopify, down 9 and 810%.

Dan Arkhamen was just talking about PepsiCo's pivoted into healthy urs, snack foods and sodas. PepsiCo, which sells, as you know, both traditional Doritos and the protein enhanced kind, whatever, bubbled up 4 and 910%. Today, our tribal Coca-Cola gained 2 and a 10th percent. Cereal and Granola Bar King General Mills added 1.9%. bond prices went up when that happens. The yield goes the other way. Ten-year T-note stands at 4.27%. At the moment, you're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. There are some challenges in retail construction right now. Building costs and borrowing costs are both high. There are tariffs and the trickle-down effects thereof. The President's immigration policies are a very particular kind of headwind, and consumers continue to buy a whole lot of their stuff online. That is not to say, though, that there aren't some bright spots, and a lot of them are to be found in Texas, which is seeing some significant brick and mortar construction, as marketplaces Elizabeth Troval tells us.

There's an appetite for retail real estate out there, says Ibera and Acute with the firm CBRE. But nowhere is building it, quite like Texas. Retail tends to follow where the people go. And people across the country and around the world have been moving to Texas and droves. He says roughly a quarter of all new retail construction last year in the U.S. happened in Texas. And five of the top seven markets for new retail construction in 2025 were in Texas. So that's Dallas, Houston, Austin, Fort Worth, and San Antonio. In Dallas, Bob Young with the real estate company, Whitesman, says large new supermarkets have been a major driver of retail construction.

We're in a grocer gold rush. And why is it? It's so simple. Retail follows rooftops. And rooftops are multi and single family, and they're all fed by commerce, which is job and population growth. The family's buying homes in new suburbs and excerpts need somewhere to shop, and people still like buying groceries at a physical store. In Houston, Wade Green with Colliers is seeing growth in what he calls power centers. Think of those large shopping centers. You've got a target, an academy, Ross Burlington, you know, in a row with some kind of smaller shop retail and pads up closer to the road. Amenities are also playing a role in these new retail spaces, says John Chang with Marcus and Milla Chap.

Retail has shifted over to entertainment and activities and health, you know, with gyms and fitness and pickleball courts. And while retail construction in Texas is expected to continue, at a decent pace, he does see some signs of cooling. We did see a slowdown in job creation nationwide. And as that's occurring, a lot of the construction in Texas and the rest of the country, quite frankly, is starting to slow down a little bit. Immigration policies also impact the pace and cost of construction, he says, as well as demand for all kinds of commercial real estate. I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace. Live music is kind of having a moment.

149 shows for Taylor Swift on the Erez tour, 86 for Beyonce the past couple of years. Harry Stiles starts his tour this summer, 50 shows on the book so far, and those, as you know, are just some of the biggies. Goldman Sachs says the live music sector is going to grow 7.2% every year for the next day. decade. More live events, of course, means you're going to need a whole lot more people to run those events. Drew Millard wrote about how the industry is planning to recruit and train the next generation of roadies in Bloomberg the other day. Welcome to the program. Good to have you on. Thanks for having me. Really excited to be here. Tell me about this place called Rock Littitz, and I guess they had a career day that you were there for. Yes. So the background for this is that

If one is a major touring musician, one is going to want to rehearse. And if a person or group has a massive stage show, they're going to need a place that is as large as the stage that can also fit their crew, their gear, etc. And so Rock Litits basically is one of the few places in the nation. They actually have another location that just opened in Nashville, where major touring artists have the space and privacy to rehearse for these massive complex tours. Because you got to remember that, you know, something like a Sabrina Carpenter concert is essentially this massive construction project done at the pace of a Michelin Star restaurant and done at the precision of a Michelin Star restaurant. And then you got to tear it all down and do it again the next day. Right. Do it the next day in a city 400 miles away. Let me ask you the labor force question, though, right?

Because that's what caught our eye about this piece. Of course. In the vernacular, they are roadies, but they are, it turns out, I learned from reading this piece. So much more than that, they're technicians, their drone operators, their construction people. And it's booming, honestly. Yes. The industry was sort of confronted with an issue of roadie brain drills.

a few years ago, like classically, roadies would stick around with the same artist forever. When COVID hit a bunch of these roadies retired, and suddenly the industry was like, oh my gosh, we need more people and we need it fast. So the industry had the struggle to let people know that these jobs existed, and not only that, that if they wanted those jobs,

they might need to think about doing some specialized training while they were still in school. And when I say school, I also mean like things like trade school. It's not just like these are good jobs that you don't need a college degree for. How good? Am I making 75? I'm making $100,000? I believe that the starting salary for a lot of these roles is like 60. But you have to remember your expenses are lower because you are on the road with a band.

You're not paying rent. You are eating, you know, catering every day. And I believe one person whose talk I went to at the Roadie Career Day at Rock Littitz said that her husband started at something in that range and ended up making, quote, exorbitant amounts of money. It was interesting to me that the CEO of Rock Lettits, with whom you spoke, characterize these as careers in live entertainment. I mean, they're sexy-ish jobs, right? Oh, yeah. And they use the term live entertainment specifically because a lot of these skills are transferable to things like, you know, theater and especially sporting events.

And, you know, the live entertainment industry is going to be. be pulling a lot of people in the next year for the World Cup, which obviously is in America. Sure. I didn't even thought of that. Were you tempted? I mean, you've got a career as a journalist, but were you tempted? Of course. There's nothing that teenage me would have wanted to do more than still away on a bunk

and do rigging for altar bridge. Drew Millard is instead a journalist in these days. Well, you know, you win something you lose so, man, right? His piece was in Bloomberg about the new Rody Workforce. Three, thanks a lot. I appreciate your time. Thank you for having me. This final note on the way out today, which can be found in our ever-expanding, would you take your paycheck in Bitcoin file?

The granddaddy of cryptocurrency has been having a tough run down. Another two plus percent today. It hits $73,000-ish dollars apiece. that is the lowest it has been since the cryptophile Trump administration took office. Jordan Manj, Zaniel Maharaj, Janet Wynn, Olga Oxman, and Virginia K. Smith are the digital team. I'm Kyle Rizdal. We will see tomorrow, everybody. This is APM. For second and third generation kids, holding on to your family's culture can be difficult and expensive.

I'm Rie Mechreis, and this week on This Is Uncomfortable, I talk with author and journalist, Amin Ismail, about how passing down his Egyptian roots to his kids has become a line item in his monthly budget. I don't want to have kids who can't speak Arabic or read Arabic. This is the only chance I get to do this, right? When they're really, really young, I won't get another chance to help guide them and, like, help them learn Arabic for the sake of them be connected to this massive heritage that they're inheriting. Listen to This Is Uncomfortable on your favorite podcast app.