Marketplace - O Fraser fir

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

There’s about a 1 in 5 chance your Christmas tree came from North Carolina this year. But growing them isn’t easy. In this episode, we check in with Fraser fir farmers in the Asheville area, who took a major hit from Hurricane Helene. Plus: Christmas Day football streams on Netflix, higher minimum wages for many Americans in 2025, and Arctic tundra is transforming from carbon sink to carbon source.

Hey everybody, it's Kai. Time is running out to give a tax deductible donation to Marketplace before the end of the year. Donate today to support the public service journalism that you rely on. Every donation and every dollar helps us plan for the new year ahead. Go to Marketplace.org slash donate and invest in news you value and trust. That's Marketplace.org slash donate or you can follow the link in the show notes. We've got a wintery mix in store today. Christmas trees, football, and a trip to the Arctic from American public media.

This is Marketplace. In Baltimore, I'm Amy Scott in for Kai Rizdal. It's Tuesday, December 24th. Good to have you with us. More than nine million workers will get a raise next week when 21 states and 48 cities and counties increase their minimum wages. Recent increases elsewhere are one reason workers at the bottom of the wage scale have seen their incomes rise even faster than higher earners in the past few years. By next year, about a third of U.S. workers will live in a place where the minimum wage is at or above $15 an hour, more than twice the federal minimum, Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman reports. Next year's minimum wage hikes are the legacy of sustained political pressure

by advocates for low-wage workers, says Sebastian Martinez Hickey at the Economic Policy Institute. We're more than a decade into the Fight for 15 movement, which started out with worker organizing in New York City amongst fast food workers. Nearly one-half of US workers will live in states with a $15 an hour minimum wage or higher by 2027, Hickey says. They include very wealthy states like California, but it's also a rural state like Nebraska will reach $15 minimum wage in a couple of years. That's more than double the federal minimum wage, which 20 states follow, says Yannette Lathrop at the National Employment Law Project. There's a substantial workforce that is mainly in the South that is stuck at $7.25.

And those states have 37% of the total U.S. workforce. The South is home to a majority of Black workers. Minimum wage hikes do well at the ballot box. Economist Michael Strain at the American Enterprise Institute says that's not too surprising. Strain says voters tend to support minimum wage increases because they think it's going to increase their wages. When the minimum wage goes up, wages a little higher on the income ladder tend to go up as well.

But Strain says 15 an hour or higher isn't good for everyone. The higher the minimum wage goes, the harder it is for the least educated, least experienced and most vulnerable workers to find jobs. The minimum wage is indexed to inflation in nearly half of states, rising automatically with the cost of living. Michelle Evermore at the Century Foundation worked on Capitol Hill the last time Congress raised the federal minimum wage. Mitchell Hartman Indexing to inflation didn't seem quite as important in 2007 as it does now after our experience over the last few years.

When she says a sharp spike in inflation hit low-income households particularly hard. I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace. Wall Street knocked off early on a high note. We'll have the details when we do the numbers. For the first time ever, Netflix will be ringing in Christmas with a couple live NFL games. Tomorrow the platform's nearly 300 million subscribers will be able to watch Kansas City play Pittsburgh and then Houston against Baltimore. Go Ravens. It'll all kick off with a performance by the Queen of Christmas, Mariah Carey, followed by a halftime show by Queen Bey, aka Beyonce. Netflix is just the latest major streamer to push into live sporting events. Amazon Prime has Thursday Night Football, Apple has pro soccer,

and that play can come with big rewards, but also big risks, Marketplace's Megan McCarty Corino reports. This may be Netflix's first entry into the big leagues of sports, but the streamer has been getting its reps in with some lower stakes live events, like a roast of football legend Tom Brady

and the much hyped boxing match between internet celebrity Jake Paul and 58 year old Mike Tyson last month. Are you ready to make history? Netflix sent 65 million subscribers around the world tuned in for the fight, the most streamed sporting event ever. But there were some hiccups. We couldn't get it going actually at our house for some reason.

Elizabeth Parks at market research firm Parks Associates was one of many viewers who experienced technical difficulties. On social media, reports abounded of issues with buffering and low resolution. We drove over to friends across the street. They were also having problems, but they ended up throwing it from the phone to the TV. Streaming live events is technically difficult to plan for, says Dan Rayburn, an independent streaming media analyst. How do you prepare when you don't know how long people are going to watch for, how many

people might tune in just for the Beyonce halftime show, and where are they going to come from around the world? Streaming platforms work with internet service providers in advance to free up capacity, but Rayburn says there's not a lot of precedent. What Netflix is looking to do and the scale they're doing it at has never been done before. So why even attempt? One answer is advertising, says Charles Schrager, a business professor at NYU. The NFL is the North Star. That is for one thing. That consistently dominates television. 93% of the most watched broadcast programs last year were NFL games, and streamers are eager to

intercept some of those eyeballs. I'm Megan McCarty-Corino for Marketplace. The Frazier Fir is one of the most popular Christmas tree varieties. They smell amazing, have a nice pyramid shape, and hold onto their needles a good while. And in North Carolina, the trees are also a crucial economic asset for people in the state's rural mountain communities. Twenty percent of the country's Christmas trees are grown there. The job of growing those trees has been tough lately. This year, Hurricane Helene barreled through the region weeks before harvest season. Blue Ridge Public Radio's Laura Hackett has more.

D. Clark is kind of like the Santa Claus of Christmas trees. He's a white-bearded farmer in the mountains of western North Carolina, where he oversees 400,000 Fraser fir trees. It's a mountains of Western North Carolina, where he oversees 400,000 Fraser Fir trees. It's a big tradition in North Carolina. You come to the mountains and get a fresh cut Fraser Fir. Fraser Fir trees are native to Appalachia, and so is Clark. His grandfather was one of the first to start growing Christmas trees commercially.

But in the last decade, he says, farming has become more challenging. To be a farmer anymore, you can't only just be a good farmer, you have to be a good business person. And it is very hard to combine both. The trees take 10 years to grow. So when things go wrong, like the historic floods from Hurricane Helene, the ripple effects can last for years. Business-wise, we took a huge hit.

We estimate our losses in the neighborhood of three million dollars a lot of his property was damaged and flooding and landslides took out some of his seedlings what's really keeping Clark up at night though is a deadly fungus that he's expecting to bloom as a result of the floods it's called a phytophora and it's a microorganism that attacks the roots and causes the roots to die. And once you get it in your soil, you can't get it out. Phytophora is fairly common. It kills houseplants and other crops too.

Phytophora, the Latin, means plant destroyer. That's Justin Whitehill, the director of North Carolina State's Christmas Tree Genetic Program. There's really no solution for those trees that are out there. It's just going to, unfortunately, lead to a mortality event for some of those trees. The floodwaters probably helped Phytophthora travel. What we're worried about is where that pathogen was able to spread to. Some areas that have never had a problem with Phytophthora may now be more susceptible to it because the water spread it around to those areas.

Lauren Henry His research team has been looking for solutions, everything from genetic modification to complex grafting techniques for the trees. Kevin Larkin That's basically editing the DNA of the tree to try to make it more resistant to the pathogen that we're facing. Lauren Henry But those solutions are not here yet. And it'll be a few years before Christmas tree farmers know how much the fungus has spread. This year, though, there are still plenty of Fraser fir trees available for Christmas.

Like here at the farmers market in Asheville. Look at that one. It's beautiful. It's pretty. It gives me the Christmas feeling. I want it! Nine-year-old Jessah Hager has found the perfect tree. This one, this one, this one, this one. This one, this one, this one. This one, this one, this one. This it! Nine-year-old Jessah Hager has found the perfect tree.

This one, this one, this one, this one. Let's get this one sweetie. Her technique works. Her family leaves the market with a six-foot tall, bouncy, Frasier fir tied to the roof rack of their car. Nearby, Christmas tree farmers Bob and Ray Hoxett are helping other families pick out their trees. We're just blundered around the market.

The Hoxetts are brothers who own their own farm. I asked Bob about the hardest part of growing Frasier firs. Maintaining your sanity. What am I thinking? He loves growing trees, but there's a lot he can't control. Like the flooding from hurricanes and the existential threat of fungus destroying his crop. He says this business is kind of like gambling. Farmers are the highest rollers there are in the country.

You know, you're always betting down the road. And so you're betting that eight or ten years from now that somebody will want that tree. For now, though, lots of customers want his Frasier Furze. By the end of the day, he's sold out. In Asheville, I'm Laura Hackett from Marketplace. Coming up... When I walk in the stores at Gacita del Campo, that's it. You're loved, you're embraced, you're treated with dignity.

Where do I sign up? But first, let's do the numbers. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 390 points, 9 tenths percent to finish at 43,297. The NASDAQ picked up 266 points, one and a third percent to land at 20,031. And the S&P 500 gained 65 points, 1 in a tenth percent, close at 60-40. American Airlines added 6 tenths percent, a technical issue temporarily grounded all

its flights earlier today. Both Delta and United Airlines improved 1 in 7 tenths percent. This holiday season is expected to be a record one for travel. The Transportation Security Administration is expecting some 40 million travelers over the Christmas and New Year period. U.S. Steel strengthened one-and-nine-tenths percent after a committee of top government officials failed to reach a consensus on its proposed sale to Japan's Nippon Steel Corporation. President Biden will now make the call. Nippon Steel firmed up 9 tenths percent. You're listening to Marketplace.

This is Marketplace. I'm Amy Scott. This month, NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, released its annual Arctic Report Card, and the news was not good. NOAA reported that after storing carbon dioxide in its frozen soil for millennia, the Arctic tundra is now becoming a source of carbon emissions. Umair Irfan is a correspondent covering climate change for Vox, where he wrote about the changing tundra. Welcome to the program. Hi, Amy. Thanks for having me.

So for people who aren't familiar with this region, talk about what the Arctic tundra is. What does it look like? What region are we talking about? Well, it's a region in the northern latitudes. It is a vast treeless plain. It actually covers about 20 percent of the planet's land area, so it's actually quite large. But the vegetation on there tends to grow very slowly because in the Arctic, of course, the winters are very long. That slow cycle of growth actually gives it this really strong power of being able to capture carbon from the atmosphere and store it for very long periods of time. And the soil beneath it is usually frozen year

round. And so that acts as a critical mechanism stalling sort of the cycle of carbon and making sure it withdraws more than it deposits into the atmosphere. So that has changed as the tundra becomes a net emitter of carbon instead of a sink. What is the impact of that and why has that happened? Well the planet as a whole has been warming up and that has had some of its most profound effects in the Arctic regions. The Arctic is actually warming anywhere from two to four times faster than the rest of the planet. But yes, as we've seen the Arctic warm, we've seen a number of different mechanisms starting

to play out, particularly with the soil. The permafrost layer, the year-round frozen layer of soil is starting to become less permanent. It's starting to thaw out in the warmer seasons and with that, that means microbes in the soil start digesting a lot of the carbon and the vegetation that's there and as they do that they start to emit carbon dioxide and methane. Recently the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to their analysis, they found out that basically over the past decade, the tundra has now become a net emitter, that there's more carbon dioxide coming out of the soil,

coming out of the tundra and going into the atmosphere that is being absorbed. That has some pretty important effects for the rest of the planet. Obviously, it means that this ecosystem that we were counting as a sink is now a source, and that can also create more of an amplification and sort of a feedback loop that leads to even more warming. Talk about the role that wildfires play in this. I was surprised to hear how many

wildfires have been in the region in recent years. Right, a lot of people don't seem to associate fire with the Arctic because it tends to be very cold, but fire is a natural part of the ecosystem. We do see, have historically seen wildfires in places like the tundra. They don't tend to be very frequent or happen very often but more recently we've been seeing the pace of wildfires picking up and that also puts that carbon back into the atmosphere that the vegetation was previously absorbing and so this increase, this uptick in wildfire activity we've seen in the Arctic in the tundra regions is a big reason why we've seen this tipping from being a sink to a

source in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Wow. Well I want to talk about some of the economic factors here because as the Arctic warms there's just more oil and gas development going on. Is that just going to lead to more warming and kind of feed the cycle? Kyle Sifuot Potentially. You know, the Arctic is, you know, we tend to think of it as this frigid desolate expanse, but there are about four million people that live north of the Arctic Circle. There's a lot of mining activity already going on there. There are indigenous communities that live there.

It's also potentially an important shipping route. And of course, with the retraction of sea ice, that means that there's more resources offshore and onshore that they can access. But crucially, oil and gas development is also driven by the market. And so even though they may have access to the oil and gas that's available there it's still a pretty expensive place to do that kind of extraction work and it really only makes sense for companies when oil prices are really high. Right now we have actually kind of an abundance of oil and gas on the global market so even as this resource becomes more accessible it's

not a guarantee that companies are really going to be chomping at the bit to try to start drilling. They're going to probably wait for gas prices to go back up and then maybe start doing more development work there. So we hear a lot about this concept of tipping points in climate change and the thawing of the permafrost is one of those. How frightening is this report card to you as someone who covers climate change? I would say it's definitely concerning but I wouldn't go as far as to call it frightening. Some of the scientists I talked to were a little wary of using the term tipping point here and one of the scientists I spoke

to about this actually made the point that you know this is potentially still a reversible thing. That if we are able to, you know, limit our output of greenhouse gases, that potentially we could see the balance tip back in the other direction. You know, the past decade has been exceptionally warm and the past two years have been the hottest on record. That doesn't necessarily mean that the next year will also be even hotter. You know, Part of the reason we saw the exceptionally hot years in 2024 and 2023 was because of El Nino, and we expect that fever to sort of break, but the momentum is moving in the direction that the Arctic is becoming less able

to absorb carbon over time. That much is definitely true. That does potentially add up to a scenario where we see far more consequential effects, even far south in much lower latitudes because the Arctic is actually really important for regulating climate and weather in other parts of the planet. Umair Irfan covers climate change for Vox.

Thank you so much for your reporting. My pleasure. Thank you again for having me. We've got a podcast all about climate solutions you should check out. It's called How We Survive, available wherever you listen to podcasts. Sit down restaurant chains have been having a tough time this year. More than a dozen high-profile names like Red Lobster and TGI Fridays filed for bankruptcy. Others have been rolling out value deals to get people in the doors. But some old-school restaurants have stayed afloat and the holidays are an important time of year when people dine out more and are drawn to tradition. Corinne Ruff has this story from Los Angeles.

When you step into Monte Carlo Italian Deli in Burbank, California, you'll see wooden Pinocchio statues everywhere. It's a nod to the name of the attached cafeteria-style restaurant. It's no frills, big portions. You can get a glass of red wine for just $4.25. Kathy Hampel is standing in line at the deli. She's get a glass of red wine for just $4.25. Kathy Hampel is standing in line at the deli. She's at Monte Carlo to stock up for the holidays.

I love their sausage. It tastes like ours. Hampel has been coming here since the 70s, and she says it's like a second home. And it's just a good feeling, because I see Italian people talking Italian, which I haven't heard for years. It's cozy, it's comfy and that's a big

reason why people come to restaurants like this during the holidays. Anthony Scuticcio took over the business from his father-in-law. He says Christmas Eve week gets a little hectic. The catering business is flooded with hundreds of pickup orders for lasagna and eggplant parmesan and the deli business triples. People come in here on 22nd of December and they pull a number and they have to wait maybe an hour and a half for the number to get called. But they have a good time with it. He says customers are willing to wait for a traditional meal.

Plus occasionally celebrities make appearances. Jay Leno sometimes comes by and tells jokes in line, which keeps the mood light. But Monte Carlo, like a lot of restaurants, has been struggling with inflation. Scootikio has been struggling with inflation. Scootikio has had to raise prices. That cheap glass of red wine cost 30 cents more than it did last year. If a piece of cheese goes up, so you raise the price, but what do you do when your gas bill goes from, when it doubles?

What do you do when your electricity bill goes up? I mean, those are the things that are hard to calculate. But he's hoping his customers will stick with him, in part because of nostalgia. Hudson Reilly, Senior Vice President of Research at the National Restaurant Association, says when people do go out, they want a unique experience. And younger generations are leaning into the restaurant model from the 1950s to 1970s. You know, there's a saying in the industry that's what's old is new again. He says restaurants can count on a healthy sales boost between Thanksgiving and New Year's.

Last year, holiday spending at restaurants was up almost 8% compared to the year before, according to MasterCard's spending pulse indicator. Part of that is thanks to holiday get-togethers. Those keep business chugging along at 62-year-old Mexican restaurant Casita Del Campo in L.A.'s Silver Lake neighborhood. So many celebrations are happening. Thank God. Owner Robert del Campo took over the restaurant from his parents.

Over the years, it became a safe haven for the queer community, and that welcoming atmosphere is still at the heart of the business. When they walk in the stores at Casita del Campo, that's it. You're loved, you're embraced, you're treated with dignity. People also come for the fresh food, like the chilis en nogada. They make it special for the holidays because of its festive red, white, and green colors,

which also represent the Mexican flag. It's a chili poblano that's stuffed with different kinds of meat and spices. And on top of the walnut sauce is fresh pomegranate seeds. Del Campo says it's been really difficult the last few years. Overall, revenue is down. Competing restaurants are popping up in the neighborhood. He's had to cut back on overtime hours and dip into savings.

But he's grateful that his late father had the foresight to buy the land, so at least there's no mortgage on the business. And it helps having the long view of a restaurant that's weathered decades of change. Del Campo still leans on advice from his late father. You can't do anything about what's going on over there, over here, over there. You just gotta focus on your space. In other words, in an industry always looking for the next big thing, restaurants might be better off playing up what they already have.

In Los Angeles, I'm Corinne Ruff for Marketplace. This final note on the way out today. Christmas Day is traditionally a big date for movies. So how about a look at the box office this year? Several films are opening in theaters tomorrow, including the horror remake Nosferatu, Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, and boxing story The Fire Inside. Deadline reports the holiday week could bring in $280 million in ticket sales, comparable to last year. For the year, Hollywood is on track to bring in $8.75 billion, not bad for an industry still recovering from last year's writer and actor strikes.

Our digital and on-demand team includes Carrie Barber, Jordan Mangy, Dylan Mieteman, Janet Nguyen, Olga Oxman, Ellen Rolfes, Virginia K. Smith, and Tony Wagner. Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital and On Demand. And I'm Amy Scott. We'll be back tomorrow. This is APN.