Marketplace - Santa’s warehouse workers

Episode Date: November 23, 2024

Seasonal hiring is in full swing and demand for temporary workers is back to pre-pandemic levels. But unemployment is down, so retailers are gonna have to be flexible to fill those jobs. A lot of those open spots are for warehouse jobs, not brick-and-mortar store positions. Also in this episode: After nearly two years of ChatGPT, who’s using it? And, we visit the only master’s-level nurse-midwife program in California.

Tis the season for consumption, so today we'll talk about the businesses, workers, and shoppers who make it happen. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In New York, I'm Kristin Schwab in for Kyra's Doll. It's Friday, November 22nd. Thanks for listening. Yeah, a lot happened this week. News of the political kind, also about the economy, from inflation to retailers to consumers. To help sort through it all, we have Sadiq Reddy at

Politico and Courtney Brown at Axios here with us. Hey, you two. Hi, Kristin. Hey, Kristin. Hello, hello. Well, it was a big week for retail earnings. Ahead of a big week for retail, there was Walmart, Target lows, the gap all reported. Courtney, what do you think what they had to say tells us about where holiday spending might be headed? Something really unsatisfying is that we kind of got divergent narratives about the state

of the US consumer. And if you're an econ nerd, like me, like many of your listeners, maybe, you look at these earnings reports from Walmart, from Target to try to get an understanding of how the consumer is doing. Is this going to be a strong holiday season? Walmart says yes. Target says no. And so now it's a question of which one should you believe. We're in this kind of confusing economic moment where we can't tell whether we're at kind

of a pivot point and things are going to start to weaken. And I think that makes it really difficult. It makes it possible that Walmart could be right and Target could be right. A little bit of both. Well, maybe we could turn to consumer sentiment numbers that we got an update on today then. We got the November revised consumer sentiment numbers, which are on the up and up. And a big bullet point here is that sentiment was split by party. Democrats are more likely to feel bad about the economy. Republicans are more likely to feel good. And I want to know, Sadiq, what that tells us about what Courtney was just talking about.

And also, if we are so fickle, does consumer sentiment even matter? What just happened on the election two weeks ago, that's what just happened. And that's this has been one of these last few election cycles, one of these enduring features of consumer sentiment that the national mood is so tied up with who is winning the White House that these numbers shift in some direction within weeks of the election, sometimes within days. We'll know with some of these gauges next month. There's a saying when you look at consumer sentiment, watch what consumers do, not what they say. And this is a clear indication that

job market is still quite healthy, layoffs are low. There's no reason to expect that consumers are going to pull back on their spending even if they feel a little bit gloomier because their candidate did not win two weeks ago. So I wouldn't put too much stock in this, but there are other factors going on right now that we will see in the coming months. Will Republicans suddenly feel better about the inflation picture after January 20th than they did before November 5th? Will Democrats flip a little bit who had been a little bit more on board with where inflation was headed? Will they feel differently? That's actually a really important indicator

of inflation expectations that does matter a little bit more than consumer sentiment does. Mm-hmm. Well, we don't know exactly what's to come in January, but we do know that it's likely that tariffs probably will be part of the picture. Courtney, you recently wrote a story about business owners stocking up on goods. What are you hearing from them and how worried are they? Yeah, I spoke to someone who said that, you know, the moment after, you know,

the election was kind of decided the next morning, he felt that he was getting kind of an influx of calls from his clients asking how could they get goods from overseas faster in order to kind of, um, front, front load on inventory to escape tariffs. Um, and I think that there are some anecdotes that that's actually happening. Um, Stanley Black and Decker, for instance, um, toolmaker, they told investors this week that their inventory was looking on the heavier side because a

few things were happening, but they said that because of tariffs, they had imported more goods than maybe they might need. Now I want to be clear. I mean, there's only so much stuff you can import to get ahead of tariffs. I mean, it looks like these tariffs are coming whether retailers want them or not, but how bad they are, we won't know yet. Sure. Well, I want to pull back for a second and look at the bigger picture with inflation, which tariffs may or may not have something to do with. Because central bakers in Australia,

Russia and India have expressed concerns about maybe an uptick in inflation. Inflation rates in Canada and the UK came in a bit hotter than expected this week. Sadeep, what does that mean for us in the US? It really means that we've got to be on the lookout for a potential resurgence of inflation. Inflation as a rate has come down quite a bit. Price levels, of course, have not adjusted, and that's what's got a lot of consumers still concerned. Businesses are now worried about what if that price level goes up, and that's where the

tariff and the stocking concerns come in. If you're concerned, as we just said, if you're concerned about prices going up overseas, you want to bring product in. If you're concerned, as we just said, if you're concerned about prices going up overseas, you want to bring product in. But there are other factors as well. If the economy does hold up, oil prices could go a little bit higher and create a little bit of that resurgence. In the US, we have other factors with labor costs, particularly low-end labor and concern about deportation of workers who might be filling the gap in the lower end and farms and factories. These are all things that are going to weigh on minds.

The fact that it's a global phenomenon though really is something that has carried on through prior births of inflation. So that's why everybody is watching it so closely now. Hmm. Well Courtney, what are you looking at next week to give us a, to thread the story of the macro picture when we get a bunch of data? What data are you keeping your eyes on? Okay, data. Okay, I won't talk about the fact that I'm looking forward to my mom's cooking for Thanksgiving.

But on the data front, for what is for a lot of people a short week, there is some interesting data coming out next week, including inflation, personal consumption expenditures, price index, not as sexy as CPI, but that is the one that the Fed cares about. So we get an update on that next week. One other thing I'm watching is we get a revision on GDP. So we'll see whether the economy is as strong as we thought it was, or is there a bump up, a bump lower? I think that'll be on my radar for sure. Gotcha. Sadip Reddy is at Politico, Courtney Brown is at Axios.

Thanks again, you two. Thanks, Kristin. Thanks, Kristin. Wall Street Today was feeling a little thankful this week before Thanksgiving. We'll have the details when we do the numbers. Sadeep and Courtney and I were just talking about holiday retail and what it says about the economy. Holiday retail hiring can tell us something too about how much shopping stores expect people to do and about the job market and how many people are looking for seasonal work?

Marketplace's Kimberly Adams has more. With holiday sales expected to increase between two and a half to three and a half percent this year, the National Retail Federation estimates stores will need to hire between 400 to 500,000 seasonal workers. Ben Meadows teaches economics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Ben Meadows, M.D. It looks like hiring is back to kind of the pre-pandemic level, but on a year-by-year basis, that is actually a lower hiring level than last year.

Lyle Ornstein But unemployment is pretty low too, which means retailers are struggling to fill all those jobs this season. One of the strategies, says the National Retail Federation's Ed Iggy, keep things flexible. Many of my members go out of their way to make sure that their employees are accommodated in providing opportunities for them to work at and when they deem appropriate. Flexible shifts, app-based scheduling. Another strategy, be more accommodating to different kinds of workers, perhaps luring in retired workers who want to make some extra cash over the holidays. And, says Iggy, certainly on the disability front, many of our members have

been very aggressive going out to disabled workers and trying to accommodate them in the workplace. Because there are all kinds of jobs that need filling over the holidays. Transportation, warehousing, retail, obviously these are the biggest areas. James Atkinson is with the Society for Human Resource Management, or SHRM. We have seen kind of a larger percentage of retail hires this year compared to some of the recent years, so a larger percentage of the overall seasonal hiring. And more of those jobs are in e-commerce rather than brick and mortar shops. So Santa's elves are more likely to be packing a box at a warehouse than bringing you up at a cash register.

In Washington, I'm Kimberly Adams for Marketplace. On yesterday's show, we told you about the Department of Justice's plans to end Google's internet search monopoly. More specifically, its plans to try to restrain Google from influencing the development of artificial intelligence, which got us thinking more about AI. Because next week will mark two years since the debut of OpenAI's Chat GPT. Two years of hype and bans and scary predictions about the end of the world as we know it. So we had Marketplace's Matt Levin take stock of how much people and businesses are actually using AI.

I hesitate to tell you this, but Google has a relatively new AI product called Notebook LM that can basically turn anything you feed it into a podcast. Economist Anton Koronek at the University of Virginia uses it all the time, mostly to summarize research papers that are a slog to actually read. I sometimes do that now because honestly, those voices are so engaging and it's so well done. It's quite impressive.

HOFFMAN Notbook LM is just one of the many leaps the tech has made over the past two years. Generative AI is also less likely to just make things up. And yet, AI is not being adopted as quickly as Koronek would have thought. KORONEK There is this almost free tool that's extremely powerful. And it's like $100 bills lying on this floor and nobody's picking them up. Convincing businesses to pick up those low-hanging dollars is part of Shane Cummings' job. He's the president of Acrolinks, a company that offers AI content standard services to big enterprises. He says while tech and finance have been early adopters, other industries are just more risk-averse. One of the things that hasn't changed in the last two years is that large enterprises,

all enterprises, they are accountable for the content they produce. They're legally accountable, they're ethically accountable, they're financially accountable. Yet about 40% of the U.S. working age population uses generative AI in some way, according to a recent study co-authored by Vanderbilt University economist Adam Blandon. He says the early spread of AI mirrors the pace of a previous tech revolution. Our overall adoption rate among workers looks very similar to the overall adoption rate of computers in 1984. Just to give you some perspective, 1981 was when the IBM PC was released.

Landon also says there may be more AI going on in the workplace than we know about. It may be a few more years until employees are comfortable telling their bosses they use ChatGPT to whip up that PowerPoint. I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace. Coming up. People are starting to think about Christmas and holiday shopping. Starting to think about shopping and starting to shop are two different things. But first, let's do the numbers.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 426 points, about 1%, to close at 44,296. That is a record. The NASDAQ advanced 31 points, a tenth percent, to finish at 19,003, and the S&P 500 added 20 points, three tenths percent, to end at 59.69. For the week, the Dow gained nearly two percent, the NASDAQ picked up one and three quarters percent, the S&P 500 finished 1.7 percent higher. Matt Levin just told us about that chat GPT anniversary. OpenAI is private, but checking some public companies in the AI business. NVIDIA lost 3%, Meta retreated 0.7%, Alphabet fell 1.6%, and Amazon shaved off 0.6% after it announced a new $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic.

Gap surged almost 13 percent after the clothing retailer boosted its full year outlook. Department store chain Ross lifted 2 percent after a quarterly earnings report investors liked. Bond prices rose. The yield on the 10-year T-note fell to 4.41 percent. You're listening to Marketplace. Money, money, money. Kids always have questions about it, and maybe you do too. That's why Million Bazillion, the webby-winning podcast from Marketplace, is here to answer the awkward and sometimes surprising questions your kids have about money. We explain concepts like savings accounts, retirement, and the differences between brand names and non-brand names.

Million Bazillion is the place for you and your kids to learn about money together. We help dollars make more sense, get it? Listen to Million Bazillion wherever you get your podcasts. This is Marketplace. I'm Kristin Schwab. There is a real shortage of medical workers in this country. We need more dentists and physicians and nurses, and specifically nurse midwives. These are registered nurses who have graduate-level training and provide pregnancy care, including delivering babies, mostly in hospitals. In California, there's just one school training nurse midwives. The only other program in the state has paused admissions as it shifts

to a doctoral degree program, which requires significantly more training. The move worries maternal care advocates because they say the change will make training longer and more expensive at a time when access to care is dwindling. From LAist LEU reports. The room is buzzing at the Women's Health Simulation Lab at Cal State Fullerton. That's because today everyone gets their own anatomic model of a pelvis and a baby head. Professor Angela Sajobi is teaching a class to midwives in training. She holds up an example pelvis and mimics how a baby moves through the birth canal. Today the class is learning about the first mechanism of labor with your baby ending up with... Today the class is learning about the first stage of labor. Last week students practiced catching babies with a mannequin in a birthing bed.

Next week they'll learn how to suture using foam and raw chicken for practice. Student Janine Ruiz says it's a sort of hands-on experience that helped her choose the school's program. We got to practice, like how do we position our hands and me. And it's not a person, it's a mannequin. So if we mess up, if we drop the baby, it's okay. Nobody's getting hurt. I couldn't imagine my first experience of this being at the bedside. That would be terrifying. Ruiz and other students are training to be certified nurse midwives. Studies have shown that being cared for by a midwife has led to fewer c-sections and fewer preterm births.

But only about 12% of births in the US are attended by a midwife. So Jobi, the professor, says midwives can fill a critical gap as the country faces a shortage of thousands of maternal care providers. So we need more people providing care for women. Nurse midwives are very capable to provide this care. But Cal State Fullerton only graduates about 10 to 12 midwives a year. And now it's the only master's level program left in the state training these nurses. This year, the other program in California, UC San Francisco, paused admissions to switch

to a doctoral program. Sojobi says that will make it harder, especially for people of color, to enter the workforce. Sojobi says it's already difficult to recruit people of color. Now we're going to increase the amount of time you're going to be in school and the amount of money you're going to pay for school. She says midwives can play an important role in the black maternal health crisis, where black birthing parents are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications. For us to be able to start really changing the data on disparities between care, the people to do it are the nurse midwives, and those are the people we have less of practicing.

The doctoral program at UCSF will cost around $150,000, nearly $90,000 more than the master's program. It will also be longer by six quarters. The school says a shift is part of a national movement to change advanced nurse degrees to doctoral ones and will better prepare graduates with more expertise as they navigate a complex healthcare landscape. Students can take classes in things like health policy, leadership and healthcare innovation. But the American College of Nurse Midwives is opposed to a doctoral requirement. Ginger Breedlove is past president of the group. She says there's no evidence that a higher degree increases the ability to safely provide care as a midwife. You may want to do a post-master's doctoral degree if you want to teach, if you want to

build your resume to go into administrative leadership, but not to practice. She says at a time when the maternal health care crisis is so pressing, schools need to make programs more accessible. In California alone, nearly 50 maternity wards have closed over the last decade. In Los Angeles, I'm Ellie Yu for Marketplace. I I was just a kid when Tickle Me Elmo broke Black Friday, but I still somehow remember all the news reports of shoppers causing an absolute frenzy to get their hands on the toy. Well, a lot has changed since then about how we shop, but Black Friday, which is one

week from today, it's still the biggest shopping day of the year, and it requires a lot of prep for retailers, especially if you're one selling what's at the top of every kid's list. That's the setup for today's installment of our series My Economy. I'm Stevie Bell. And I'm Amanda Calhoun. We are co-owners of Fantasy Island Toys in Fairhope, Alabama, and we're sisters. We had known before we went into business together that we wanted to own a business together. So when we found out in 2021 that Fantasy Island Toys, a children's toy store, was coming for sale, we knew

that we had to figure out how to purchase this business. Amanda's kids shopped here growing up and in my quest to be the best aunt that I could be, I certainly shopped in this store for my nieces and nephews prior to us buying it. This store is a landmark in the city of Fairhope and it's really an honor to be able to continue its legacy. So far we are off to a great holiday season. We have definitely picked up in the past, I would say about two weeks. With Thanksgiving being a week later, we're seeing people, like it's been a little bit slower start to the season. But like I said, you know, I mean, in the past two weeks, we have definitely picked up and people are starting to think about Christmas and holiday shopping.

That's right. I mean as a toy store, fourth quarter is absolutely the pinnacle and we are very optimistic. There's a lot of joy in the air. We know that the community is prioritizing shopping local and that is absolutely going to help our bottom line. going to help our bottom line. So to prepare for this holiday season we did hire two employees in addition to the six that we have on staff already. Yes so two seasonal employees. We have retired teachers, we have retired art teachers, we even have a seasonal employee that has a master's degree in dyslexia education. So I mean like a really remarkable staff

that will help talk about not just how fun the toy is, but the developmental benefits of each toy. Like all siblings, we have our moments, but at the end of the day, we know that we're in this together and that we have the support of our families as well as our friends and our staff. We definitely balance each other out really well. Absolutely. And I think that it is very special to work together and also have the same vision

for the company, which we definitely do. So it's fantastic. It's actually awesome. It's the best job that I've ever had. Yeah, it's great. And I do say that like multiple times a day. That's Stevie Bell and Amanda Calhoun, sisters and co-owners of Fantasy Island Toys in Fair Hope, Alabama. Whether you have a business partner or you're flying solo, write to us about what's happening in your economy at marketplace.org slash my economy. This final note on the way out today, we're ending this consumer topic heavy show with a word of caution for you, the consumer, as you start your holiday shopping. In a new survey, Bankrate reviewed data from 100 major retailers, and at least 50 of them,

including Macy's and TJ Maxx, have raised credit card interest rates, and they did it right before the Fed made its cuts in September and November. Usually, the two rates move in the same direction. This has put the average retail credit card interest rate at an all-time high of more than 30%, something to consider when you're inevitably tempted by that intro offer at checkout. Our theme music was composed by BJ Liederman, Marketplace's executive producer is Nancy Fargoli, Donna Tam is the executive editor, Neal Scarborough is the vice president and general manager, and I'm Kristin Schwab.

Have a great weekend, we'll be back here on Monday. Money, money, money, kids always have questions about it and maybe you do too. That's why Million Bazillion, the webby winning podcast from Marketplace is here to answer the awkward and sometimes surprising questions your kids have about money. We explain concepts like savings accounts, retirement, and the differences between brand names and non-brand names. Million Bazillion is the place for you and your kids to learn about money together. We help dollars make more sense, get it?

Listen to Million Bazillion wherever you get your podcasts.