Marketplace - Walmart wants Vizio, but not for the TVs

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

Walmart is looking to buy TV manufacturer Vizio, according to The Wall Street Journal, even though it sells its own brand of TVs. That’s because these days, a TV’s worth is tied to its streaming platform, and acquiring Vizio’s SmartCast could help the big-box retailer grow into another kind of company. Plus, split surveys on small business optimism, a map of all the country’s zoning laws, and the falling number of small farmers.

On this Valentine's Day, would it surprise you to learn that almost 90% of floral designers are women and 95% are white? Well, stick around. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Baltimore, I'm Amy Scott, in for Kai Risdahl. It's Wednesday, February 14th. Good to have you with us. We will dig into some new data on who's doing what jobs in the American economy later on in the show. But first, sometimes the different signals we get about the economy tell very different stories. Take small business.

This week, we heard that owners are feeling both less optimistic about the economy. That was from the National Federation of Independent Business. Also, we're hearing that they're feeling more optimistic from American Express. So which is it? And how much should we make of these sometimes contradictory surveys? We asked Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman to sort it out. Glass half full? Small business owners are feeling particularly optimistic and resilient in 2024.

Brett Sussman is with American Express, which surveyed several hundred small businesses with one to 500 employees. This is a far cry from this past summer, when 80% cited the economy impacting their long-term confidence. Sussman says problems like inflation and supply chains are abating. Meanwhile, 50% said they're looking to proactively expand new locations, products, services. Glass half empty. Small business owners are still feeling the pressures of inflation and labor shortages. That's Holly Wade at the National Federation of Independent Business,

which surveys its members, most with 40 or fewer employees, every month. January did show a dramatic drop in sales expectations. which surveys its members, most with 40 or fewer employees, every month. January did show a dramatic drop in sales expectations in the next quarter, and the challenges in which they're having to operate take up a lot of resources and time. They're particularly sour on that. Now, these are different surveys. NFIB skews to smaller small businesses. And a lot of those firms are struggling, says Alex Schwartz at fintech firm Fundkite. We process a lot of business funding applications,

and we've been seeing a lot of negative sentiment. It went from, how do I grow my business, to more like, how do I stay afloat? Schwartz says macroeconomic conditions might improve later this year, but for right now, his clients are still dealing with high prices, high interest rates, and a lot of stress. I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace. One decidedly not small business aiming to become even bigger is Walmart, and the big box chain is in talks to buy TV manufacturer Vizio. That's according to the Wall Street Journal. But Walmart already makes its own line of TVs called On with two Ns. Marketplace's Christian Schwab looked into why the company would want to buy a competitor.

Walmart isn't really in this deal for Vizio's TVs, but for Smartcast, Vizio's streaming software. And that's increasingly where the money is. Jennifer Kent is VP of Research at Parks Associates. She says these days, a TV's worth is tied to its streaming platform. Walmart's private label brand, On, uses Roku, which Walmart does not own. Kent says acquiring Vizio's SmartCast may help the big box retailer grow into another kind of company. You know, the tech giants aren't just making products. SmartCast may help the big box retailer grow into another kind of company. The tech giants aren't just making products. They're very interested in having kind of a relationship with you across many aspects of your life.

In other words, Walmart has Amazon envy. Tim Hanlon is CEO of the Vertere Group. He says moving into media could help expand Walmart's brand, along with its access to proprietary data that's pulled from commercials that lead to purchases. They want to be able to tell marketers and advertisers that a dollar invested in a particular form of advertising is going to net out into three or four times that amount in a sale. That's a very alluring proposition to a marketer who is under increasing pressure to prove that their marketing dollars are actually working.

Hanlon says in a few years, streaming will hit a turning point, and roughly 10 software companies will become a handful. Acquiring Vizio would give Walmart a quick in before consolidation. And Jennifer Kent at Parks Associates says she could see Walmart strengthening its position by creating its own movies and shows. Walmart Originals. Coming maybe someday to a TV near you. I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace. Wall Street today brushed off yesterday's heartbreak and was feeling the love. We'll have the details when we do the numbers. One obstacle to building more housing in this country is zoning laws. Local land use regulations that say what we can build and where.

And in many parts of the country, what we can build are detached single-family homes. No duplexes, no apartments, which critics say limits the supply of housing and inflates prices. But with an estimated 30,000 different local zoning codes around the country, getting a handle on these regulations can be challenging. Enter the National Zoning Atlas, an effort to map these different laws. Sarah Bronin is director of the Atlas and also a law professor at Cornell. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.

I think people's eyes sometimes tend to glaze over when we talk about zoning. Not mine, I should say. I find it fascinating. But give us a sense of how important these laws are that govern where and what we can build. So zoning is this hidden power that governs, as you said, almost everything that gets built in this country. And each one of these local governments set out their own rules in massive texts, sometimes 150, 200, sometimes 3,000 pages that outline exactly what you can do in every lot in the city and connect those rules to corresponding maps. So zoning is text and map and put those two together. And it really is the blueprint for how

most places in the United States develop. So what did you set out to do with this atlas? Well, the atlas originated in Connecticut as part of an advocacy movement. The people who were involved in that understood that looking across the state with 180 plus different zoning jurisdictions was hard for lay people. And if you didn't understand how zoning worked, you couldn't understand how to change it. Once we launched that atlas and it did, in fact, help lead to change, people in other seats are using that methodology, which has evolved over time, to produce their own atlases. All right. So we'll talk about some of the changes it has prompted in a bit, but I want to get to know this tool. So I'm on zoningatlas.org. Let's check out

Connecticut. I'm going to open another tab here and zoom out a little bit so we can see the state. So what what do you see here? So Connecticut is a fairly small state when it comes to landmass, has about three million people. It has about one hundred and eighty three zoning jurisdictions. Right now, you see across the state a sea of what would be the primarily residential color in the map, a sort of medium purple color. So when you go to Show Me Where People Can Build Single Family Homes, you'll see the map change, but actually not by much. but actually not by much. 91% of the state remains shown on the map in some shade of purple. If you now click on apartments with four or more units, you'll see virtually all of the purple disappear, leaving just about 2% of the land across the state zoned for multifamily housing.

across the state zoned for multifamily housing. So now when you go from overwhelming 91% of land allowing single family housing to underwhelming, or you can insert your own adjective here, amount of land in the state that allows for apartments, what does it say about a state that allows so little multifamily housing in its suburbs and rural areas and puts all of it in the places where, again, you would consider these the historic central cities. It doesn't really seem like every part of the state is offering opportunities to a diverse range of households and people with lots of different preferences. What impact has this mapping tool had? I mean, if a housing official or a politician sees all that purple suddenly disappear to reflect that basically no apartments can be built in most of the state, has that changed anything? In Connecticut, the Zoning Atlas has informed change both at the state level and at the local

level. So we have heard from advocates all over the state that they have used the Atlas in their own communities at zoning board hearings, at city plan commission hearings. In addition, in other states, we've seen the Atlas tool used similarly for reform in Montana, and the zoning Atlas was created there, I think is probably a key example of that. There, the Atlas helped to inform sweeping legislative changes that people have called the Montana miracle. The reason for atlases and the reason why so many people have been working on them across the country is that we want people to understand what zoning says and what it does. And I mean, no one's going to read Baltimore's zoning code of 569 pages. They might click on a map and they might say, oh, that's interesting. Maybe we can do a

little better. All right. Sarah Bronin is director of the National Zoning Atlas. Super interesting. Check it out. Thank you so much for, too. American farms are getting bigger. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's latest census report found that in 2022, the average farm was 463 acres. That's up about 5 percent from 2017 when the last census was taken. Meanwhile, the total number of farms fell by more than 7 percent in that time. This reflects a decades-long trend of consolidation in the industry. Small and mid-sized farms are struggling to compete, and larger operations are often ready to snap them up

if they fail. Marketplace's Savannah Marr has that story. The businesses that control our food supply have been consolidating for decades, and that includes farmers themselves, says Phil Howard, who studies food systems at Michigan State. Policies have tended to just reinforce the idea that it's better to get big or get out. Howard says federal crop insurance and subsidies and lending practices favor large operations and incentivize farmers to produce more and more to maintain the same income. You know, it's described as a treadmill, and the small or medium-sized farmers are much more likely to fall off. And if they do fall off, sell their land to bigger operations, which tend to grow just one or two commodity crops,

says Ben Lilliston with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. We're getting less and less diversity in our food production. Lilliston says that's part of how the U.S. ended up importing more food than we export, three out of the last five years. And consolidation has consequences for rural economies when, say, eight ag employers become one. That means fewer people in that community, fewer kids going to school, fewer small businesses in town that are servicing those farmers. This trend also makes agriculture a more exclusive club.

According to the census, 95 percent of American farmers are white, and on average, they're just over 58 years old. Now the barriers are so high. Dania Francis, an economist at UMass Boston, says generations of discriminatory lending practices have already separated Black farmers from millions of acres of land. Larger farms, more capital needed. Just like it's harder to buy into that great neighborhood for a house, it's much harder to buy into farm ownership today. Especially if you don't own farmland to begin with.

I'm Savannah Marr for Marketplace. Coming up. So it's a traditional art form, Native American art form, where you're basically tacking down a couple beads at a time. Turning art into a business. But first, let's do the numbers. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 151 points, 4 tenths percent, to close at 38,424. The Nasdaq added 203 points, 1 and 3 tenths percent, to end at 15,859. And the S&P 500 picked up 47 points, almost 1 percent, to finish at 5,000 even. Kristen told you earlier about why Walmart might be interested in Vizio.

Walmart returned three tenths percent. Vizio unplugged more than one and a half percent. The man who helped come up with the Pop-Tart has died at 96. His name was Bill Post, although he invented the toaster pastry for W.K. Kellogg, which popped up five and six tenths percent. Rival Post Holdings, again, no relation, sank almost six tenths percent. General Mills softened nearly nine tenths percent. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace.

I'm Amy Scott. Every year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out a snapshot of the American workforce, breaking down 600 or so occupations by gender, race and ethnicity. The data for 2023 just came out, and it will come as no surprise that many jobs are heavily skewed. I mentioned at the top of the show about 90 percent of floral designers are women, 99 percent of pipe layers and masons are men. Black workers make up about 13 percent of the labor force, but almost 50 percent of postal service, mail sorters, and processors, and only 7 percent of lawyers. Lauren Weber is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal where she wrote about the new data. Lauren, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. So there is a lot that surprised me about this data. Like I knew early childhood education was female dominated, but 97 percent. What surprised you about some of these numbers? Similar. So I was interested in this data, which comes out every year, and there are so many tidbits

in here. Like you said, the preschool and kindergarten teachers was interesting. I actually polled informally a bunch of friends and colleagues about that and said, what percentage of preschool or kindergarten teachers do you think are male? And I got answers everywhere from about 5% to 30%. I think everybody was shocked that it was so low. So, you know, when you look at the numbers themselves, and gosh, there's so many great examples, I think it's something like less than 2% of all logging professionals, all loggers are women. Asians make up around 65% of all manicurists and pedicurists and also a very

high proportion of software developers and scientists. So it's a really striking portrait of the American workforce. As you say in the piece, there are sociology textbooks worth of explanations for these numbers. But you cover labor in the workforce. What are some of the big factors driving some of the disparities? Well, I think the question that's really difficult to answer, but is also the most interesting one, is how much of these career choices that we all make are based on choice and how much of it is about other factors, maybe self-stereotyping or cultural stereotyping, maybe harder barriers like discrimination or lack of opportunity. You know, any one person

can describe their own career trajectory. But when you look at this data overall, it really shows a lot about, you know, who does what in our culture and how we sort ourselves into different occupations and how in some ways we are sorted. If some of this is about self-selection, you know, maybe there are some good reasons for women choosing certain professions, for example, why do these disparities matter? I think there are three main points of why it matters. One is I hear a lot from employers about labor shortages. They can't find enough people for jobs. I hear that especially with a lot of blue-collar jobs, trades jobs. Well, you can look at this data and see, okay, only 2.2 percent of plumbers and pipe layers are women.

For people who are trying to hire people in those fields, there are entire, like huge pools of people that they're not reaching. The other pieces, I do think it's really important that we think about these questions of representation and who we see around us and how that shapes our thought about what's possible for us. When my son, who's now 11, was around three or four, we used to read a book that was about a long haul truck driver named Jane. And one day he said to me, I'm sad because I want to be a truck driver, but I can't because I'm not a lady. And I think about that all the time and thinking about like how, you know, seeing ourselves in jobs expands our idea of what's possible. And then I think, you know, perhaps most importantly, there's the issue of the connection

between income and occupation. So you look at a lot of the jobs that where women comprise like 90% or more, they're often lower paid. And, you know, that's, I think, another reason to try to seek more equity in the workforce and a better spread of people being able to use their talents and skills. Now, you did find some professions that are occupations that are fairly representative of the makeup of the workforce overall. What are some of those? Yeah, that was really interesting. So we looked at the, you know, the composition of the overall workforce and then what occupations mirror that closely. And we found things like hairdressers, paralegals, dietitians and nutritionists. Interestingly, journalists kind of mirror the population in terms of racial and ethnic balance.

A lot of those jobs are service oriented. So they're very community based. So they might be, you know, by neighborhood or by, you know, region or geography. So I think that's one reason why they might be a little bit more representative than other jobs. Many of those jobs are actually dominated by women, like hairdressers or dietitians. And I don't have an explanation for that. Hmm. Well, as you said, textbooks to be written. Exactly. Lauren Weber wrote about disparities in the workforce, some pretty surprising numbers. We'll post a link to it, of course, at marketplace.org. Lauren, thanks so much. Thanks for having me. We just heard about the demographic breakdown of some jobs in the workforce.

One occupation we didn't mention but is in that BLS data set is artists, of which about 52% are women, a slight overrepresentation compared to the proportion of women in the workforce. But what's missing from the data is personal experience. And that's where our series, My Economy, comes in. My name is Michaela Thompson, owner of Beadwork by Michaela LLC. I'm from the Nimiipuu Reservation in La Pue, Idaho. I currently reside in Washington, D.C. I am a full-time artist, and I do an art form called beadwork. So it's a traditional art form, Native American art form, where you're basically tacking down a couple beads at a time, and you're making regalia, we're making accessories. I grew up on the East Coast, and I moved to LaPoy, Idaho at the age of 10. coast and I moved to LaPoy, Idaho at the age of 10. When I did get there, I was living with my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, Chloe Halfmoon, and she had stacks and stacks of beads

just in her closet. And so she basically just said, yeah, I'll teach you how to bead. Ever since then, I've been beading. I finally decided to kind of jump into going into business three years ago and have it look back then. It's been a great decision. When I first started pricing, I started pricing my hats, for example, at $500. And then I bumped it up a little bit more because I realized how quickly they were selling. They were still selling pretty quickly, went to $800. $800 was a little bit of a steep stretch because I realized some people weren't buying as quickly. Went to 800. 800 was a little bit of a steep stretch because I realized some people weren't buying as quickly. So I decided to go back to 700. That became my price. What a lot of people don't realize is what you're paying for isn't

time. I get that question a lot. How long did this take? Well, technically, it took all of my 30 years of life because I had to have this experience. I had to see this in certain ways. So that's kind of been my journey with pricing. Because of the success of my beadwork business, which is still growing, there's still the long term goals. But I had the opportunity of starting a second business called Indigenous Creative, which is a creative agency. We focus on multimedia and events. And so the whole purpose of that is being able to showcase Native creatives and Black Native creatives just as myself and being able to support those dreams and those goals of those artists. So it all kind of comes from my journey

of being an artist and realizing, hey, this is what I love to do. I'm representing my community. I'm representing my culture. And I don't have to rely on a nine to five that I'm not passionate about. I can do what I love and still do all of those things. Michaela Thompson, beadworking in Washington, D.C. Let us know what's going on in your economy, will you? You can write us at marketplace.org slash my economy. This final note on the way out today, a good reminder to proofread, people. The rideshare company Lyft saw its stock jump by more than 60 percent after markets closed yesterday, partly thanks to a typo. The company's earnings release projected that one profit measure would increase by 500 basis points this year. That would be 5 percent. It was supposed to say 50 basis points or half a percent. Big difference. CEO David Risher told CNBC that thousands of eyes missed the extra zero before the release went out.

Guess they could have used a couple more. The mistake was quickly corrected. Shares today still ended up about 35 percent. Our media production team includes Brian Allison, Jake Cherry, Jessen Duhler, Drew Jostad, Gary O'Keefe, Charlton Thorpe, Juan Carlos Torado, and Becca Weinman. This is APM. And it's happening because of a podcast. I think your podcast has changed my life. And I'm going to share this podcast with everyone I meet. Sold a Story investigates how teaching kids to read went wrong.

New episodes of Sold a Story are available now.