Marketplace - Where producer prices go, consumer prices are likely follow

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

On Thursday, we got to see the second act of our monthly inflation double feature: the producer price index. Producer prices rose 1.3% in September, which is the largest jump since 2022 — and a hint at the risk that more consumer inflation is coming down the pipeline. Also on today's show: inflation outliers and a holiday spending preview. And later, continuing The Age of Work series, we head to a Mumbai-based clothing company looking to expand to domestic sales.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.Read the stories in today’s episode:Producer prices see biggest jump in four yearsNot everything is suffering from inflationConsumers expect to spend as much or more this holiday seasonA family business in Mumbai is finding growth in a complicated global economy

We've got two and a half stories on inflation today. We've got one of our small business regulars, and we've got our series, The Age of Work. From American Public Media, this is Marketplex. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Resdahl. Thursday is the day. October the 15th is the date. Good, it always is to have you along, everybody. You know, there is some degree. degree of peril in predicting the future, in guessing what is going to happen down the line. There is an entirely different degree of, I don't know, hubris, misplaced confidence,

temptation of the gods in saying outright what is going to happen down that same line. But the economic calendar has lined up this week in such a way as to make it possible to do very nearly that. This morning brought us the second act of our monthly inflation double feature. It's the producer price index. Prices, very broadly speaking, at the wholesale level, business inflation, one might say, as opposed to consumer inflation, which we got yesterday. August to September, the PPI rose 1.3%, the biggest monthly jump since the heyday of pandemic inflation back in 2022. Year to year, a whopping, and that is not too strong a word, 6.3%. So, about those predictions? Marketplaces Elizabeth Trowball has more now on the economy yet to come.

As opposed to the Consumer Price Index, the producer price index measures... Price changes that producers and service providers receive for the sale of their products. That's Scott Sager with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So think the price an accounting firm charges a business for their services, or the price a farmer sells their crop for. Whether it's a manufacturer who's manufacturing into a type of manufactured food or if it's being sold for ultimately for the public. In this month's data, energy was a major contributor to rising producer prices, though not the only contributor. Adi Chibave is with Bank of America Securities. It's a broad-based surprise in inflation that should be quite unpleasant from the Fed's perspective.

He says the September producer data raises the risk that more consumers, inflation is coming. Because for producers, this is an input cost. It may not be a massive share of their costs, but it's there and it's moving up. Now the question is, how comfortable do they feel passing those costs on to consumers? This is yet another round of shocks caused by the global supply crunch on oil and fuel, says Dana Peterson with the conference board. The first round is immediate.

So you can see gasoline prices, you know, spiking intraday. But then as producers endure those prices and pass it along or share it, share the burden with the wholesalers, the retailers, and ultimately the consumer, that takes longer. So the higher prices producers are feeling now are expected to ripple out to consumers in the months to come. I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace. Wall Street on this Thursday, blue chips did pretty well, everything else, you know, fine. We will have the details when we do the numbers. Woeful, though the inflation data has been these past couple of days.

There are, and I know it might not feel like it, but there are slices of this economy, where those rising prices aren't rising quite as sharply as the top line numbers for both the CPI and the PPI might indicate. Marketplace's Caitlin Tan has that one. Start with food prices. It's kind of a shock, but at least some foods are not experiencing a whole lot of inflation. David Anderson with Texas A&M says that has a lot to do with how much diesel it takes to get that food to your supermarket. How close is that agricultural product as it comes from the farm to the way us consumers buy it at the store? Other foods have a lot of supply right now.

We've got a lot of dairy cows pumping out milk, for example, so prices are low. Other foods have seen a drop in demand, take bacon. For a long time, we put bacon on everything. But these days, people mostly want to eat beef, and it's expensive. So? We're not adding to the cost of that meal by putting bacon on there. Egg prices have actually fallen. U.T. Austin's Carolabinder has noticed.

I have my own 19 chickens, and we sell eggs. She used to give her customers a deal for $3 a dozen because store eggs were so pricey. But now they're not. Remember bird flu? It's simmered down. The flocks are recovering. There's more supply, and so prices are falling. Another area with moderate inflation, tire prices. They're up 7 tenths percent for producers, 2 tenths percent for consumers. Aaron Keating with Cox Automotive thinks that's because of competition. Consumers can shop everywhere. Costco Mavis is a local dealer. Unless they literally pop one and can't drive the car any further.

you will see them go around and shop for them more. Appliance and TV prices have actually declined. One can buy an extraordinary television. It might only cost $200. Anibon Basu is with SAGE Policy Group. It's easy to focus on everything that's become more expensive. But there are some items that have benefited from technological progress. Basu says if it wasn't for tariffs, wars, immigration-related labor shortages,

we might be seeing lower prices on a lot of stuff. I'm Caitlin Tan for Marketplace. Inflation wasn't the only data out today. The Commerce Department told us retail sales were up 8 tenth percent in September. More evidence, perhaps, of consumer resilience in what are trying economic times. All right, to be honest, perhaps is doing a lot of work in that last sentence, because retail sales are measured in what's called nominal dollars. That is the straight up dollar amount not accounting for.

Here it is. Inflation. And as Marketplace's Kristen Schwab reports, that spending math is making retailers a little bit uneasy. When you have six kids, someone always needs a new something. Sweeters, shoes. It's expensive. Julie Yang and her husband live in Minnesota. They spent about $800 on school supplies and clothes this fall.

I was like, oh my God, I can't believe how much we're spending. back-to-school stuff because Asher is growing constantly, and then I love sprouting like crazy, too. Seven-year-old Harvey gets a lot of hand-me-downs, which helps some because, of course, everything is more expensive these days. Filling up the family van costs $100 alone. So Yang says this year they're going to stick to a budget for Christmas.

Actually, rumor has it. Old St. Nick is dealing with inflation, too. Mom and dad and Santa Claus talked about it. We're just going to be. do one, either one really big thing, or we're going to just do, you know, a lot of little small stuff. Most families begrudgingly plan to spend as much or more than usual on the holidays this year. That's according to the consulting firm Accenture, which has been surveying thousands of Americans for 20 years now. Kelly Ask You, Accenture's global retail lead, says shoppers are anxious and

realistic. It doesn't mean that when December rolls around and I'm out in a a mall and I'm feeling festive, I'm not going to pull out my credit card for one more purchase. So shoppers are trying to plan ahead. Askew says one in five started tackling their holiday lists before August. Nine out of ten will start before Black Friday. People are trying to spread out the financial pain. So they're becoming more thoughtful about what they buy. They're searching harder for value. And they're making deliberate tradeoffs. Early shopping is honestly music to any retailer's ears. For one, it's easier to manage inventory. And a longer shopping season could coax consumers into spending more overall. Simeon Segal, a consumer equity research analyst at Guggenheim Securities, says Amazon, Walmart, and Target are already rolling out sales.

And so discounts have begun, they likely will increase in force the closer we get to holiday. In fact, Siegel thinks retailers will have to offer deeper discounts than in recent years. I think this year, the only way to get revenues, the only way to protect that sales, is to have more discounts, is to get people to buy more things. In Minnesota, Julie Yang still wants the holidays to be magical, but it means making some compromises in other spending categories. We've decided where we're not going to just grab whatever snacks our kids see, so we've been limiting that more.

We stopped doing more tie and swimming class. That's about $350 a month saved or earmarked for the holidays. I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace. What we just got right there from Kristen was how consumers have been thinking about spending. The flip side of that retail coin, of course, is small businesses and how people have actually been spending. Dylan Demery is the owner of She's Fly. That's a women's fly fishing outfitter and retreats company based in Fort Collins, Colorado. As far as this point in the year, our overall sales, including the retreats and retail, we're up 18% year over year.

So that was really great news. We weren't really expecting that kind of increase, but we'll take it. We were impacted by the drought in Colorado and in the western half of the United States this year. We had to cancel one of our retreats. and on a couple of others, the hot, dry weather impacted the quality of the fishing, the rivers where we were fishing. We did have to make a major change in our Montana retreat because the river that we were on had closures due to the heat, and we had to move to an entirely different river two hours away.

So there were some definite changes that we experienced because of the drought. planning for that is really impossible. Our retreat's booked out for the most part. We were trying to reach 80% of booking, and I think we probably came in right around 70. People have been very, very cautious about how they spend their money and where they spend it, and if they're going to do a fly fishing retreats or not, and we totally understand all of that. We hope to have all of our 2027 retreats posted and ready to buy. book by the end of November because I know a lot of people look at maybe doing those as gifts.

And we're also looking at our store and kind of reconfiguring some things about what we want to sell. Maybe there's some other products that we might want to bring into the store. Maybe some things we want to stop selling. So we're going to be looking at all of that in the off season here starting in November. Small business, right? It's really hard. Dylan Demery, if she's fly, wrapping up the fly fishing season in Fort Collins.

Colorado. Coming up. Polyester is not good for Mother Earth. From the mouth of babes. First, though, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial's up 556 today. That's a little bit more than 1% closed at 52,177. Did the blue chips. The NASDAQ scrounged up about 20 points, less than a 10th percent. Finished at 26,713. S&P 500, up 25 points, 3 tenths percent, 7744. Chris was telling us about consumer moods, checking a couple of retailers who need us to be shiny, happy people to prosper. Target rose eight-tenths of one percent. Walmart gathered one and a half percent after Deutsche Bank upgraded that stock, saying the Bentonville, Arkansas company could attract more customers seeking relief from persistent inflation. Dollar General rang up about three percent on the day.

Same theory there, I imagine. Tech firms had another rough days. AI spending and debt fears took a toll. Gosh, couldn't imagine why. by NVIDIA lost 1 and 8 tenths of 1% AMD down 1 and a half percent on the day. On the other side of the ledger, Corweeve rebounded from a big decline yesterday,

added back nearly 6% on the day today. Bond prices went up when that happens. The yield on the 10-year T-note went down 5.08%. That's quite a drop, actually, from its recent highs. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. We're going back to India now for our series,

the age of work. Before we do, though, a call back to Monday and me trying to cross a street. Here it's just pandemonium. I was out with the guy yesterday and he said, we only have one rule and that's that there are no rules. So imagine, if you would, trying to run a small business in that environment. The concept of time or meetings or, you know, we'll see you at a particular time like just didn't exist. The way a meeting time is set up is that we will come in the second half of the day. And what does that mean? I'll start a laugh. It's like waiting for the cable guy. I was just going to say, it's like when the cable guy says, I'll be there between noon and six. Yeah. Yeah. That's Jay Shroff. He actually used to work on Wall Street. But 10 years ago, he came back

to India to run the family business with his sister Neha, who had also had a whole different career. One of the first few things that I really worked on was creating systems. in the place because everything was so unorganized. Must have killed you as a CP as an accountant coming in here, right? Come on. It was. Together, they were on the clothing company. Their dad and their uncles started. It's called Fashion Panda.

They've got a factory in the far northern suburbs of Mumbai where they do most of their bulk manufacturing. But Nila Richardson and I took the far more convenient option of meeting them in their main offices. We've been in this unit and the one across it, with my father since 1973. This neighborhood is booming. There are brand new shopping malls and car dealerships right outside,

which speaks to the moment that both India's changing economy is in and that this company is in. Like the sketches here. Look, the children's clothes. Alongside the racks of linen blouses and skirts and dresses. Those whiteboards over there. So walk me through the whiteboards. Are whiteboards covered with notes about this company's brand identity?

Thing is, though, right now, most of the work that Jay and Naha handle is making clothes for other brands to sell. Why work with a global brand instead of forming your own brand? If you're doing the design, if you're doing the manufacturing, if you're sourcing, you're smiling at me. So there's something to this. You're sourcing the sustainable materials. You obviously have the relationships with the suppliers and the vendors. What is the logical next step when you could have global? distribution under your own brand.

I'm so glad you asked. Thank you. Who's going first? Jay and Nehau are indeed launching their own brand. It's a children's clothing line called popcorn. It's early days for us with popcorn. But having said that, I think it was also, I got to give credit to my wife, Carjal, because... Are you the wife? Now we're going to have to talk to her. She's been in her nice and quiet. You formed this idea? Yes. I mean, it actually came from our son. Because...

How old is your son? He's six now. Wow. And very surprisingly, he has polyester for his PE uniform. He goes to his coordinator and says, polyester is not good for Mother Earth. Because we are doing a unit of inquiry, which is Mother Earth. And they all come to class and they flip the labels and they're like, oh, you know...

Your son's a rabble rouser. Well, it's so interesting because up here, right, the popcorn brand aesthetics, quality, natural fabrics, linen, cotton, right? And clearly that's taken hold. Jay and Neha, alongside Kajel and their six-year-old son, are trying to tap into a younger demographic and into new markets. But there are some very real challenges. There's competition, right?

There's competition from other industries. So it's a very recent anecdote, but we lost one of the employees to the gig economy. And she went to work somewhere where she will do like housekeeping work, which is, you know, you order it on an app. And she claims that she's owning one and a half times what she would own with us. I just want to know, how many employees do you have? Yeah, so the total employee count is about 200 to 250 people. And that's been an ongoing challenge to recruit the right people, to train them and to retain them the younger generation wants,

to be more educated and do something more, some other field maybe. So what we've actually done over the past few years is we've sourced migrant workers from other parts of the state, maybe even another state. We've trained them at our facility and we provide stay in food expenses and transportation to and from the factory. All of their costs are going up. I mean, do we even need to say it? T-A-R-I-F-F-S. Last year, President Trump increased taxes on Indian. imports to 26%. Then he paused them. Then he reimposed them at 25%. Then he doubled them to 50%. It's 18% now as

part of a deal reached in February. But that policy instability coming from the United States played a direct role in India and the European Union finalizing a long-delayed trade deal. And it is one reason a whole lot of companies here are rethinking their priorities. Do you need to be in the U.S. market? I think Neha has a thought on this. Nahas thought, while the brother thinks Neha's going. Actually, there's been slacking demand over the past few years, but in terms of putting a really good product on the table, you know, one that can even in this time sell at 120 euros shirt.

That kind of market, I don't know if exists in the world. US. Well, when you get up and read the headlines in the morning about global trade policy, what do you think? Do you roll your eyes or do you just keep your nose to the grindstone? What I look at first is what impact it's going to have on us on the ground. It's actually crazy because people wouldn't realize the effects that it can have, right? Okay, war happens, and then the sea roots are blocked. What that means is that you've got to use alternative sea roots. You've got to go around the Cape of Good Hope. Okay, it'll add 10 to 12 days to your I still got to meet my delivery to my customer, which then means that impacts me on the floor

where you got to suddenly plan for doing overtime shifts. This is a small operation, but big global issues really matter. Is there a space across the hall that we can see, right? Yes, yes, yeah. Let's go over a workroom, actually, than an office. Tailors and designers are making patterns and stitching samples. So the rest of the team is not here yet because it's a bit early. There are sewing machines and embroidery tables, a computer-aided design station 2,

and we are surrounded by signs of their supply chain. There are scraps of fabric everywhere, countless patterns, and racks of prototypes. This is one part of the collection here. You see it on these two racks. Oh, there you go. Yeah, there's a bunch of products. And this is all popcorn stuff? Yeah, this one specifically is all, yeah, it's all the kid stuff.

But yeah, this is linen blended with cotton. Super cute. It's adorable. It really is adorable. It's a yellow romper, sized for a kid in elementary school, a young consumer who could be anywhere in the world. Can we talk for a second about you two specifically and personally? You are now the older generation. You're not old, but you're the older generation, and there's a generation coming in behind you, too.

You went to the States, you got your education, you came back. You did a big career shift. I guess I wonder what thoughts you have for people in that rising generation as this economy changes. Our son is six. And people of his generation or maybe Gen Z today, they can get a lot from within India if they stay in India. It's the if of that question, right?

Because that's the future of this economy, is that generation, and the if they stay. Yeah. There used to be a big difference in terms of the education quality that you could have. from the West compared to what do you have in India. You now have global universities setting up campuses in India officially. And if they can build that ecosystem in India, I think that would be fantastic for Indians to study in India,

but with the global peers. Look, like he said, right, India is changing. And the kids these days are smarter already. They have access to good education. And they're confident. They just have to kind of go after their dream and do it. What comes next for Naha and Jay and Cajal and their six-year-old son isn't going to depend on what they do with this company, as much as it's going to depend on what's going to happen outside this office with the entire Indian economy.

And along those lines, tomorrow we are going to wrap it up in Mumbai with a look at the future. This final note on the way out today, we are going back to Anil Jane, the jewelry store owner that we heard from on Monday. Cut, cut, cut, cut. First have coffee, it'll get cold. That's it. That moment when I'm not in charge of the interview anymore. I like the ordering of your priorities. That's right. Those priorities, warm welcomes, and oh-so-generous hospitality were on display everywhere we went. Some tea coffee, some Indian sweets.

Does anybody want water? You like sweet, no? Let me get it. My favorite. It's water pop. It's a very, very famous street food of Mumbai. We ate pretty well. That's all I'm saying, that whole time we were there. Andy Corbyn, Mika Ellison, Maria Holland Horst, Sarah Lees and Sean McKenry and Sophia Terenzio, are the Daily Production Team on this program.

Will Story is the supervising senior producer, and I'm Kai Rizda. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM.