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Economic uncertainty, like we are living through right now, can make regular purchasing decisions challenging. Even more so decisions around big life moments, like changing your job, buying a house or deciding when or if to get married.

These choices have major consequences in our lives and finances; can a better understanding of economic theory help us make better life choices?

Daryl Fairweather is chief economist at Redfin and author of “Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work.” She joined “Marketplace” host Kimberly Adams to talk about how to apply economic theories to our choices in order to get winning results. A transcript of their conversation is below.

Kimberly Adams: I chuckled when I saw the title of your book because obviously it’s a play on the “don’t hate the player, hate the game,” idea. But why should people be thinking about economics and a lot of these decisions in our lives as games that you can apply economic principles to?

Daryl Fairweather: Well, the way that economists view different scenarios like an interaction between an employee and a boss or an interaction between a home seller and a home buyer is similar to the way that board games or video games work, where players have objectives, they have skills, and they interact with one another to win. But also, I think it can help people overcome some of the anxiety they have about achieving their goals in their career or their life because seeing it as a game, I think, just takes the pressure off, and I think it gives you more agency to just find a winning strategy.

Adams: You write a lot about sort of using these concepts of economics and game theory and strategizing how you play various games, and a big part of that is what information you have versus what information the other parties in any kind of negotiation have. And you use a really interesting example in the book about job hunting and gamifying that experience to have the most edge. Can you talk about the decision that you made about how you set up your resume?

Fairweather: So my name is Daryl Fairweather, which is a gender-ambiguous name and also kind of a racially-ambiguous name. Most people think about Daryl Strawberry, the famous Black baseball player, a man, or Daryl Hannah, the white woman actress. So depending on how people interpret my gender, it also dictates how they interpret my race. My middle name is Rose. So if I want people to know that I’m a woman, I include my middle name: Daryl Rose Fairweather. But I know it also makes people less likely to think of me as Black, even though I am biracial and Black. So when I submitted my resume last time I was applying for a job, I included Daryl Rose Fairweather to signal that, because the economic research shows that white women are more likely to be called back for interviews than Black men. So I use that information to help give myself a little bit of an edge, even though, you know, it is an unfortunate thing that I did to have to kind of manipulate how people perceive my race and gender.

Adams: You use a lot of pop culture references in this book to demonstrate how these economic games play out in real life, and you use a lot of examples from Destiny’s Child and their breakup. It comes up many times throughout the book. Can you give us a rundown of how that breakup went down and why it resonated with you so much that it ends up scattered throughout your book on sort of how economics play into regular life?

Fairweather: Well, I love Beyoncé; I consider myself a member of the Beyhive. But the Destiny’s Child example stuck with me. It was, I think, the most salient example of a negotiation gone wrong. Back when Destiny’s Child was early in their careers, they were a four-member group with Beyoncé, Kelly, LaTavia and LeToya, but LaTavia and LeToya started to feel like they were being not as appreciated as Beyoncé, and they thought that it was their management, Beyoncé’s dad, Matthew Knowles was their manager and giving Beyoncé preferential treatment. So they came to the group and issued an ultimatum that it was either them or Matthew Knowles, the manager. And I think they thought that, given that they were early in their career, the top priority would be keeping the group together. But I think what they misunderstood was what the actual goals were of Matthew and perhaps Beyoncé, that Beyoncé was the star, and that the group would survive without them. And that, I think, is something that I related to, especially early in my career. I thought that my value was my potential, but I came to realize that my employer valued me because I would work hard and work long hours, and once I realized that, it made me understand that I needed to find a new job opportunity in order to get the career that I really wanted.

Adams: You say at the end of the book that you titled it “Hate the Game” because you don’t want people hating themselves for playing the game of capitalism in its current unfair form, because it’s kind of what we’ve got. But playing to win doesn’t necessarily make you complicit in the system’s flaws, and I think that’s something a lot of people really struggle with; like you can see the problems in this economy, but at the same time, you still kind of have to work within it if you’re going to be individually successful. How do you encourage people to navigate that?

Fairweather: Well, I think that capitalism, or the current form of capitalism that we have, is unfair. It does reward people who already have wealth, who already have connections. And going from the bottom to the top is incredibly challenging, but I think that just having an understanding of economics, understanding your place in the economy, understanding at a very micro level how negotiations will go or how asking for a promotion might turn out for you, can help you just move through the economy faster and get to where you want to be faster. And I think holding on to your own values, to your own vision of where you want to be, is really important in terms of not letting capitalism change you. I think a lot of people, they get caught up and playing in the career game, and then that’s all they know how to play when there are other games out there to play like the family game, or traveling, if that’s what you’re into, whatever it is that you are working towards, making sure you hold onto it.

Now that we have at least a little more clarity on what the President’s tariffs will look like, businesses are going to have to figure out how the tariffs will affect their input costs and if they need to react or do anything differently.

So we called up a couple small businesses to find out what they’re thinking right now.

Over the past 24 hours or so, Pat Whelan, president of the grocery store Sahadi’s in Brooklyn, said he’s been feeling a tad regretful that he didn’t do more to get ahead of the tariffs.

“Maybe I should have pre-ordered some product, and stocked up on inventory and got some stuff in here before the shoe dropped,”

But Whelan said on the other hand, there’s not much he could have done. After all, imported food has a shelf life. Take olive oil, for example.

“Once you press it, the clock starts ticking. So you want to turn that stuff, you don’t want it to be sitting in the warehouse for 9 months, and oxidizing and degrading,” he said.

Whelan said it’s hard to make any plans right now, because he still doesn’t know how his products will be affected.

“Alright, so you have some clarity on what the tariffs are. Does that mean it’s going to change in two months? I don’t know,” he said.

In South Carolina, Cathrine Reynolds, who handles imports for Palmetto Tile Distributors, said she’s expecting to learn how her products will be affected in the coming days.

“Currently, I have three containers about to hit port, so I’m waiting to see what happens there, if I see a jump in my duty fees or anything like that,” she said.

Whatever happens, Reynolds said she already has a gameplan: She’ll simply tack on a tariff surcharge to her prices, just like she did during the pandemic when supply chains were congested.

“I just keep changing what we’re calling it. It’s like OK, this is the increase for now, and this is just the label we’re going to put on it,” she said.

Reynolds said over the last few years, her customers have been willing to pay up.

While we wait for the big jobs report coming out Friday, there’s lots of uncertainty in the air as the impacts of tariffs and other policies shape the labor market. But in recent years, we’ve seen a somewhat puzzlingly resilient job market despite higher interest rates set by the Federal Reserve.

Now, a new report by the Dallas Fed offers some clarity, showing how certain sectors — like health care — may be behind that resilience.

Among labor economists and monetary policy wonks, Luke Pardue, policy director at the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, said that there’s still an open question: “Why do we still continue to see that really strong jobs growth relative to pre-pandemic levels when the Federal Reserve just went through this whole tightening cycle?” 

The Dallas Fed report had an answer: Job growth has happened in sectors that are less cyclical. 

“Sectors like health care or the federal or state governments aren’t as sensitive to interest rates, because they don’t need to rely on investment or sort of credit,” Pardue said. “In this post-pandemic time, a lot of the employment growth is coming from areas that just aren’t as responsive to interest rates.” 

But there are other theories about labor market resilience.

“What looks like strength is just the normal process of recovery from very, very sharp decline employment that occurred during COVID period,” noted economist V.V. Chari with the University of Minnesota.

But he suspects there’s also something else at play. “Certainly, strong employment growth is probably due to the unprecedented surge in immigration.” 

Mitchell Barnes, an economist at The Conference Board, agrees.

“Immigration is a key piece to this puzzle,” he said. “When you really just look at the population growth that we’ve seen, that is not only adding to the worker pool, but that’s adding to households, adding to spending.” 

Immigrants increase the demand for products and services. 

Barnes added that public investments during the Biden administration also supported the labor market. 

“I think there are some one-offs where you start to look at some of the policy impacts that are underlying these numbers,” he said. “Non-residential construction — you know, potentially a beneficiary of a lot of that federal investment — has been pretty strong over that same time.” 

For each sector, he said, there are different reasons for resilience. 

Mark Moore is the co-founder & CEO of Mana Nutrition, an organization that produces nutritional peanut paste distributed to children experiencing malnutrition. Mana now employs roughly 130 people and has a production plant located in Fitzgerald, Georgia.

By and large, USAID has been Mana’s largest customer. But since the start of the year, it’s been “a kind of a yo-yo effect,” Moore told Marketpace’s Nancy Marshall-Genzer last month.

Back in January, Moore was informed that his contracts with USAID were on pause. Then, they were unpaused, then abruptly canceled before finally being restarted. The government currently owes him north of $20 million.

Moore spoke extensively with Marketplace’s Nancy Marshall-Genzer in late March about Mana, how the organization is faring amid the confusing back-and-forth status of USAID contracts, what the costs and benefits of life-saving peanut paste are, as well as what could happen if supply lines are disrupted this summer. USAID funding for Mana’s shippers and distributors has been cut.

The following are selected comments from Moore’s extended interview:

We make ready-to-use therapeutic food. It is a peanut paste that is fortified with micronutrients and milk powder. Essentially, it’s an infant formula that’s stabilized in the peanut paste, so it doesn’t have to be reconstituted where you might not have quality water. And it has a long shelf life — it has a two-year shelf life.

We serve, gosh, all over Africa. But from Central and East Africa, [we serve] the Sahel region — Chad, Sudan, South Sudan (the northern part of that), all the way across to Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria.

You eat it straight out of the packet — pull that little corner off and squeeze it into the mouth. So a mom can be taught in minutes to feed their child, and the child doesn’t have to be put into a clinical setting. That’s another big win. It’s really expensive to check kids into a clinical setting, and MANA stands for mother-administered nutritive aid.

It’s targeted for kids under six. It’s formulated for brain growth and for the important kind of neurological pathway stuff that’s going on in a kid’s brain. If we miss that window, then it’s too late. If you miss those early years, then there’s no way to catch up.

A box [of therapeutic food packets] is about $40, and that has 150 sachets. We’re not making a dollar a box. For us, break-even is a success because then we can keep going.

We make about 4,000 boxes, so half a million packets a day — 600,000. And really, we just expanded too to where we’ll be making 4x that. So we have a brand new factory. We’ve invested a couple hundred million dollars — philanthropic dollars — in lowering the price. When we started in 2010, one box was $57, something like that. And today, that box is around $42. So, in real dollars, it should be $80-some. We’ve essentially lowered the price by half. We’re feeding twice as many kids. So it’s a pretty cool story, and we’re scaling more. The future is bright, if we can keep the U.S. from bailing on their partnerships.

There’s supply and demand and all of these forces happening that we talk about in our economics classes. And in this case, you have a massive demand, right? You have children that are severely, acutely malnourished — if you want to call that a demand — but these are children that don’t have the resources to purchase it. So that means humanitarian efforts have to step in, notice the child waving their arm in the marketplace saying, “I really need this.” In their case, if they don’t get it, they’re not going to survive. So it’s incumbent upon us, as a government and as just — I don’t know — a human family, to say, “This is one place where the marketplace really doesn’t seem to be working well, and we’re going to step in and provide this food for these kids.”

A mother feeds her son a ready-to-use therapeutic food supplement pouch, similar to the ones made by Mana, in Kenya in July 2022. (Simon Maina/AFP via Getty Images)

We were last paid — I have to laugh, because that’s the depressing part — I think it was Dec. 10 or 15, or something like that was the last time we got a significant payment from the system. They owe us what we bill them — when we ship, we bill them. So that’s closing in on $20 million. But we have a bunch more that we’ve actually made that we still are waiting to get picked up that we will then bill them for. So somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million to $25 million is what the government owes us at this point, if you count actual invoices and then what we have stacked up that we’re waiting to ship. I can’t take the proverbial toothpaste back out of the tube, right? It’s in a packet that says “gift of the American people,” so those have to go. I can’t squeeze it out and put it in a different packet.

[Business from USAID] is still at 90% and we’re hoping to, if we can, find other sources, but that’s hard. Who are those other sources? Who’s going to spend $50 million a year buying this stuff in the marketplace where these kids don’t have any money? A lot of these customers don’t have ongoing budgets, so we might raise it this time — “we’re just hoping to get the money together.” It’s not a great plan going forward, but it’s the best we can do for emergency scenarios.

We are making a product, producing it, adding value, using American inputs. American farmers are benefiting. These dollars are not leaving America. They’re going to South Georgia. They’re buying peanuts from farmers. They’re buying milk from dairy in Wisconsin, packaging from a great group in Indiana. So, to cut it — you would imagine that it’s not “America first” to cut these programs.

We’re not trying to feed the whole world. We’re just trying to ask these strategic questions: Where are these kids wasted? Where are they likely to die? That’s where we need to get it. Kids who are severely, acutely malnourished aren’t hungry. They’ve ceased to be hungry because their bodies have such deficiencies. So, you can’t miss a week. You have to step in. And if you or I or any adult misses a week, there’s weight loss involved, but for a child under six — especially these children — it’ll cost them their life if we don’t act.

President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs of at least 10% on practically all goods coming into the United States on Wednesday. Many countries, along with the European Union, promised to respond with sanctions of their own.

One of the president’s goals with all these tariffs is to get more companies to make more products here in the U.S. To do that, many would need to build new factories and hire a whole lot of people to work at those factories. 

But are there enough workers with the right skills to fill all those potential new manufacturing jobs? The United States once led the world in manufacturing. These days, China does.

But Willy Shih, a professor at Harvard Business School, said we still make plenty of things.

“We do have a large auto industry, we do do vehicle assembly,” he said.

So it wouldn’t be hard to make even more cars here, he said. The workforce already exists. 

But there are lots of other things that we don’t make much of in the U.S., like semiconductor chips.

“Some of the most advanced packaging in semiconductors requires things like advanced ceramics,” Shih said. “We lost those skills, or actually, especially for some of the newer materials, we never developed those skills in the first place.”

That’s true of other high-tech products too, said Ben Armstrong at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Industrial Performance Center.

“Things like magnets, which are really critical for batteries and other core electronic technologies. We’ve really lost the capacity to build in the U.S.,” he said.

Armstrong said it’s possible to build that capacity here, either again or from scratch. “But it takes a long time, and it takes really significant investment,” likely from the government and from companies. 

They’ll need to recruit and train thousands of workers in new kinds of manufacturing.

“What they often do is they bring people who are experts from where they’re based, often in Asia, and they come to the U.S. to train this new workforce and get them up to speed,” he said. “This is a yearslong process.”

There is already some infrastructure for large-scale workforce development, said Arthur Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

“You have unions … a lot of them have apprenticeship programs that are designed already … and partnerships with community colleges across the country have been very beneficial,” he said.

But, he said, companies will probably wait until U.S. policy is clear to make a move.

“The tariffs would need to be in place for an extended period of time with some expectation that they won’t change,” Wheaton said, for companies to feel like it’s worth investing in workforce development, and for workers to feel like it’s worth training for those jobs.

Last year, over half a million U.S. bankruptcies were filed.

While entering bankruptcy can be painful and leave a financial scar, it’s often a necessary last resort for those trapped in a cycle of debt. Studies have shown that a successful bankruptcy — when a court wipes away a portion of outstanding debt — improves not only the lifetime earnings of bankruptcy filers, but the lifetime earnings of their children as well.

But while roughly 1 in 10 Americans file for bankruptcy at some point in their life, nonwhite bankruptcy filers face higher odds of actually receiving any benefit from the process, a study found.

A recent working paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research found that minority filers are roughly 13 percentage points more likely to have their bankruptcy cases dismissed without debt relief in Chapter 13 bankruptcy cases.

Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection is typically designed for debtors hoping to retain significant assets, like a home or car. Last year, 200,000 households filed for Chapter 13.

“We found not only are minorities much more likely to have their bankruptcy cases dismissed without debt relief, we found that the race of the legal officials that they interact with in the bankruptcy process can be predictive of success in their bankruptcy case,” said Sasha Indarte, a study co-author and an assistant professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

When the study controls for other characteristics, like income level or whether a filer hires an attorney, the racial disparity narrows to 3.5 percentage points.

But Indarte said that disparity is still meaningful and indicates implicit bias may be unfairly punishing minority bankruptcy filers.

“When you’re not able to get that debt relief after experiencing financial hardship, that can allow you to experience new hardships going forward,” said Indarte.

The study pins much of the bias in bankruptcy outcomes on trustees, the legal officers in charge of overseeing Chapter 13 bankruptcy proceedings.

In order to keep bankruptcy protections, debtors must make monthly payments on a court-approved payment plan for up to five years. Trustees make sure debtors make those payments, and they have considerable discretion on when to recommend to a judge that a debtor should be kicked out of their plan because of missed payments.

Lon Jenkins, head of the National Association of Chapter 13 Trustees, doesn’t buy the study’s conclusions.

“This determination to file a motion and dismiss, if we get to that point, is purely an objective process,” said Jenkins, who administers bankruptcy proceedings in Salt Lake City. “It’s ‘Here’s the case, here’s the case number and the name, and they’ve missed three payments.’ So we’re going to file a motion, but we don’t pay attention to what the race of the debtor might be.”

Jenkins argues that no Chapter 13 trustee keeps a record of a debtor’s race. And the staff that interacts with the debtor at the beginning of a bankruptcy case is often different than the staff that simply checks whether payments are being made.

Jenkins also said since trustees make their money from a percentage of those monthly bankruptcy payments, there’s no benefit to a Chapter 13 trustee to dismiss cases prematurely.

“We are definitely not incentivized to dismiss cases,” said Jenkins.

Jenkins points to systemic factors that may make minority debtors more likely to miss payments, such as less access to family wealth.

Whether implicit or explicit bias from trustees is partly to blame for racial disparities in bankruptcy outcomes, minority debtors that lose bankruptcy protections will confront a host of new financial problems.

“So bankruptcy for those individuals is a way to have that lifeline,” said Elizabeth Gonzalez, a consumer attorney for the nonprofit law firm Public Counsel. “That I don’t have to worry about my wages being garnished or my bank account being levied, or, frankly, just being hounded by creditors.”

Thousands of workers at the Department of Health and Human Services suddenly found themselves unemployed this week.

The layoffs reportedly include about 20 employees who oversaw a program that helps low-income Americans pay their energy bills: the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP. It provides money to states, territories and tribes so they can help families keep their homes warm or cool.

Congress appropriated about $4 billion for LIHEAP this fiscal year.

Every state, tribe and territory gets a set amount, said Mark Wolfe, head of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, or NEADA.

How much depends on several factors, including climate.

“A state that’s extremely cold will receive more money than, say, a state that’s more moderate in its temperature,” Wolfe said. “Same thing with a state that becomes extremely hot.”

In many states, people who qualify for LIHEAP apply for assistance through local nonprofits. 

“And then we request money from the state, and the state issues payment to us, and we, in turn, make those payments to utility vendors primarily,” said Jean Logan, executive director of the Community Action Agency of Siouxland in Sioux City, Iowa. 

LIHEAP recipients end up with a credit that offsets part or all of the utility bill for heating or cooling their home. Logan said it can be a financial lifeline.

“It makes the difference between whether or not people have their medicines and they fall behind on their other bills, whether or not they even eat,” she said. 

So a lot of the day-to-day work of LIHEAP happens at the state and local levels. But federal administrators play a crucial role, said Mark Wolfe at NEADA.

“There is no way to allocate the funds without the federal staff, there’s no way to oversee the program.”

Wolfe said nearly $400 million appropriated by Congress for this year has not yet been distributed.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.

In Minnesota, Lissa Pawlisch at the state’s Division of Energy Resources said if those funds aren’t released, “in very real terms, this means that potentially, thousands of households won’t be able to get the energy assistance that they need to pay their energy bills.”

It’s still winter heating season in Minnesota. Temperatures in the Twin Cities on Wednesday were in the 30s.

While some of us were anticipating news from the White House, gamers had their eye on a different hyped-up Wednesday announcement: Japanese gaming giant Nintendo unveiled details about its new Switch 2.

It’s the successor to the now eight-year-old Switch, which is among the best selling video game consoles of all time. The release is set for June 5, and there’s a lot riding on it, in a stalled gaming industry with booms and busts that can depend on new hardware. 

This time five years ago, Nintendo was having a moment. The company’s profits tripled between March and September of 2020. 

“We saw a massive influx of new players, hours and dollars into gaming,” said Mat Piscatella, an analyst at research group Circana.

He said Nintendo and other gaming companies have held onto most of those players, but they’ve got a lot more competition for their hours and dollars. Now that we can, y’know, go outside. 

“Getting back to that growth has been a big priority and a big challenge,” Piscatella said.

So the industry is looking for a jump start. The hour long video preview of the Switch 2 shows off new video chat and game-sharing features. 

Audrey Chee-Read, an analyst at Forrester, said the industry wants us to think of gaming as social.

“It’s about entertainment not just for yourself but how you can share that experience with your friends and your family,” she said.

And turn the people around you into gamers who will also spend money on new titles and consoles. Like, a lot of money. 

“The announced price point of $450 is, I think, pretty rich,” said Joost Van Druenen, a video game expert at New York University, who had predicted more like $400 for the new Switch. 

If you were hoping to get through one story without saying the “T” word, it’s time to cover your eyes. 

“I think that that has to do with tariffs,” Van Druenen said.

The Switch, like other major gaming consoles, is manufactured in China. 

Van Druenen said the higher price tag won’t keep diehards from standing in line on release day. But it could put off the more casual gamers the industry is really trying to reach.

One subset of the population that’s having a tough time in the labor market is young adults, especially those born between 1997 and 2012 — members of Generation Z.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for February, the unemployment rate for 20-to-24-year-olds was 8.3%, more than double overall U.S. joblessness. But why is Gen Z having such a hard time breaking in?

Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen attributes it largely to high interest rates, which he said have frozen many parts of the economy. “So, if you’re a company, you might say, well, things aren’t bad enough for me to have to lay people off, but they’re not good enough to make me hire either.”

Economic uncertainty is also a factor in constraining hiring, Sen said.

He joined “Marketplace” host Kimberly Adams to discuss his piece on Gen Z’s job frustration and what it says about the broader economy. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kimberly Adams: So how does Generation Z view this economy?

Conor Sen: Very poorly. We saw that in November’s elections, and they’ve had a reason to feel negative because they’re experiencing not just the same inflation and high interest rates that everybody else has been having to deal with over the past couple years, but also because we’re in this labor market best characterized as low hiring, low firing. If you’re 40 or 50, you might care more about the low firing part. It’s like, OK, I have a job. Layoffs aren’t that high. I’m safe. But if you’re in your early 20s, what really matters to you is that hiring rate because you’re entering the workforce, trying to move up in your career. And right now, that’s just very difficult.

Adams: So you write that unemployment rates are higher for younger workers right now. But is there anything else to suggest that Gen Z is worse off than, you know, other generations when they first entered the workforce?

Sen: Higher housing costs and interest rates are probably the big ones. I would characterize myself as an elder millennial. So, in the late 2000s, early 2010s we had it pretty tough too on the job market side, but at least interest rates were low and rents were relatively low — or at least they hadn’t gone up like crazy yet — and housing prices were too. Whereas now Gen Z has both the low hiring, the tough labor market, plus high costs, so they’re getting squeezed on both sides.

Adams: What in particular makes this labor market so hard for Gen Z to break into?

Sen: It’s because interest rates are so high as the Fed seeks to control inflation, which means that a lot of parts of the economy are frozen and waiting for lower rates or something to pick up. And so if you’re a company, you might say, well, things aren’t bad enough for me to have to lay people off, but they’re not good enough to make me hire either. If you’re 21 or 22 looking to get hired, there’s just not a lot of demand for you right now. You have the federal government that’s been cutting back, and there’s no reason to think they’re going to be hiring anytime soon. Universities are cutting back. And also, there’s the looming threat of [artificial intelligence] and what that means for workers, especially in white-collar sectors. So maybe companies that ordinarily would have hired might say, well, let’s try to figure out a way to do this with AI, rather than taking on a 20-something-year-old.

Adams: Now, you and I are both elder millennials, and we entered the workforce during a pretty tough economic period. People found a way around that. But what are the long-term consequences for this group of not being able to find a job right away?

Sen: So to your point, I think because many of us went through this 10 or 15 years ago, it feels like it’s kind of a bad deja vu of knowing that if you don’t move up in your career when you’re young, it tends to have long-term consequences on your lifetime earning potential. You get more into debt. You’re not saving, you’re not building networks and you’re not getting experience. And so it really is a big setback, and it’s hard to know exactly right now what makes things get better, certainly this year. I think corporate America came into the year with a lot of optimism about a maybe deregulation or tax cut agenda that would be good for growth, and instead, it feels like it’s uncertainty and tariffs instead. And so there’s not really a reason to think that hiring will pick up this year. And so now you’re already thinking about 2026 and it’s only early April. So if somebody were 22 and said, what should I do? It’s hard to say, well, wait for next year, but that kind of feels the story for hiring managers right now.

Adams: You point out in your piece that when the job market for young workers has looked like this in the past, it’s a bit of a warning sign for the broader economy. Why is that?

Sen: Well, typically, young people just sort of feel the trends in the labor market more significantly. Again, most people in their midcareer aren’t switching jobs as much, and they’re kind of more settled. But if you’re young, it’s often kind of last hired, first fired. And so, if companies aren’t hiring and if they are trying to lay people off, they might be cutting their youngest, least experienced workers who aren’t yet providing a lot of value to their companies. And so if that’s the kind of decision that companies are making, it might say, well, we’re trimming a little bit now, but if things get worse, we’ll have to do bigger cuts later. So, if we’re in that phase of trimming the young people now, you worry what would the next leg down look like for workers more generally.

Companies haven’t had much of an appetite for mergers and acquisitions over the last few years. Some of that was down to an uncertain economy, elevated interest rates and the hard line the Biden administration took against deals that it argued would reduce competition.

Dealmakers had hoped that 2025 would be the year that M&A finally roared back. But so far, that hasn’t happened. The first quarter of this year was the slowest in more than a decade when it comes to mergers and acquisitions, according to the research company Dealogic.

Shelling out billions of dollars to buy another company can be an extremely risky move. Drew Pascarella, who teaches finance at Cornell University, said for one, the companies might find out they have bad chemistry.

“In M&A, you’re taking on something you don’t really fully understand, at the time you’ve acquired it,” Pascarella said. “There are a lot of employees that have not worked under your employ, there’s a different culture.”

There’s also the risk that after the companies tie the knot, the broader economy turns south. Pascarella said that’s why companies have to be confident that the opportunity to increase sales or expand a product line through a merger or acquisition, for example, is worth the risks.

“But if that opportunity is a little bit murkier, if you don’t exactly know what tomorrow is going to look like, your desire to take on those downside risks becomes lessened,” Pascarella said.

Problem is, figuring out what tomorrow’s going to look like this year has not been easy. For instance, the stock market has been volatile day-to-day. Pascarella said that’s made it harder for companies to agree on purchase prices.

“If you think a stock is worth $100, and you make an offer for $100, and the stock drops to $80, or goes up to $120, that conversation becomes a lot more difficult,” Pascarella said.

And then, of course, there’s all of the uncertainty around tariffs.

“If I’m going to buy a company, and I suddenly see that it’s selling products in jurisdictions that are going to impose tariffs on those products, then the value of that company is going to come down,” said Afra Afsharipour, a law professor at University of California, Davis.

Afsharipour said countries might respond to the Trump administration’s tariffs by cracking down on M&A deals.

“You could see this coming from Canada, you could see this coming from the UK,” Afsharipour said. “There are a lot of other regulatory tools that other jurisdictions have as well that will sometimes have an impact on M&A deals, even if it’s two large U.S. companies.”

Afsharipour said the regulatory situation in the U.S. isn’t clear, either. In February, the Trump administration said it’s holding on to the Biden administration’s 2023 merger guidelines, which call for a stricter look at deals that could reduce competition.

But then, in March, President Trump fired two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, which is partially responsible for enforcing those guidelines.

“I think people expected that there would be a lot more regulatory certainty,” Afsharipour said. “And I think that is not bearing out so far.”

As a result, companies that might be interested in making an acquisition are basically just sitting on their hands right now — which might be what U.S. regulators are hoping for.

“A lot of these mergers and acquisitions are actually within the same industry, and these often result in larger market power for a single firm,” said John Bai, a finance professor at Northeastern University.

Bai said on the other hand, a slow M&A market can make the economy less efficient. That’s because companies often buy other firms to try to run them better.

“From the acquiring firm’s perspective, if they spot an inefficiently managed firm, they know they can do something with it,” Bai said. “Is it distribution? Is it brand image building? Is it management practices?”

All of that means less M&A activity could take a chunk out of corporate profits.

This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.

Just off the main road, 100 stalls nestle between several Victorian railway viaducts. It’s quite cool — twinkling fairy lights all around under high, vaulted arches. The site is London’s Borough Market, which is one of the city’s most popular food markets and attracts about 20 million visitors a year. We’re a stone’s throw from the Thames and London Bridge on an ancient site. There’s been a market around here for a thousand years.

There’s a strong smell of Stilton coming from somewhere, to my left Taste of Croatia, a bread stand to the right, plus a fun stall called Spice Mountain.

Some 30 years ago, this was a struggling wholesale market. But it has been reinvented as a fashionable foodie destination and, in turn, helped reinvent once down-at-heel Southwark. It’s run by a charity that brought in $10 million last year, with investment properties helping to subsidize the market.

Richard Stark of Stark’s Fruiterers at London’s Borough Market. (BBC)

Stark’s Fruiterers has been run by the same family for decades. Richard Stark is manning the stand and he told me a key principle: where possible, buy local.

“When everything’s in season in the summer, we’ve got a lot of farmers in Kent that we know. We’ve got good cherry suppliers, apple suppliers. A lot of the veg comes from Kent, but obviously this time of year it’s all imported,” he said.

But just as prices can spike, rents and overheads have also risen. Annual rent for a large, prime pitch rose in line with inflation to about $1,100 a month in 2024. Then there are service charges on top.

Fishmonger Jed Hall of Shellseekers. (BBC)

It can be tough to get a pitch, but Seafood specialist Shellseekers has been here for 27 years. Jed Hall peaks his head over a fillet of fresh salmon. The trick to keeping costs down and standards high, he said, is skipping the middleman.

“We’ve got our own boat down in Dorset. We’ve also got friends with boats that we buy fish from,” he said. “Obviously, we’ve got the cost of the boat, cost of the fishermen that work on the boat, cost of the regulations and licenses that you need. That has unfortunately come back to the customer.”

Judy Wall is next to me, eyeing up the turbot and the brill. She’s a regular customer who loves fish but gets out of cooking it.

“My husband cooks it. He’s very exact,” she laughed, “and he knows when it’s cooked.”

I plunge in further when I get called across to Atlantic Edge, a stall with rows and rows of oysters on display — all as a train rumbles overhead.

Out from under the railway viaduct, you come to an open courtyard littered with food stalls. You can’t miss the sizzle of the Black Pig’s pulled pork sandwiches, priced at the premium end: $16. Manager Tayla Welham said the stall has grown from a small team thanks, in large part, to Instagram and TikTok.

“I’ve been here two years and since then there’s been massive growth,” she said. “I mean, there was a team of eight of us; now, we’ve got about 30+. It does get very busy here. It’s one of the oldest food markets in London and also being in the public eye, knowing people are filming you all the time. It’s cool, it’s great, it’s fun to be a part of.”

Tayla Welham from the Black Pig enjoys the social media attention. (BBC)

But some traders aren’t so comfortable with all the attention. Over at Humble Crumble, a bright pink dessert stall known for apple-and-cinnamon crumble, I spy a sign asking customers not to film their staff. Emily Broughton is the supervisor there.

“Most of our customer base obviously are great but because it’s so huge on social media, everybody is filming — which is absolutely fine — but we just don’t like to have our staff — their faces — filmed,” she said.

Borough Market is a place where old traditions merge with modern tastes, and where the crowds are drawn to Insta-fame rather than the wholesale trucks of old.

A view of the Wild Mushroom Risotto stall at London’s Borough Market. (BBC)

A federal bankruptcy judge has rejected Johnson & Johnson’s latest attempt to settle lawsuits that allege its talc baby powder caused cancer. This is the third time J&J has attempted to resolve thousands of legal claims through bankruptcy courts. 

Johnson & Johnson is not bankrupt. It’s a profitable company. But four years ago, it created a subsidiary to handle its liabilities related to baby powder lawsuits. 

“People have called this maneuver ‘the Texas Two Step,’” said Melissa Jacoby, a professor of law at UNC Chapel Hill. 

This strategy uses what’s called a “divisive merger” to create the subsidiary, she said — a move that’s accepted in Texas. The intent is to shield a company from litigation costs. But J&J was unique, Jacoby said, in its attempt to use the bankruptcy process to handle current litigation and protect itself from future legal claims over talc products.  

“Bankruptcy is not the intended venue for profitable companies to cap their liability for an alleged harm,” she said.

Federal courts rejected J&J’s bankruptcy claims — twice — because the company was not in financial distress, Jacoby added. 

This third attempt was rejected for different reasons. Plaintiffs were given a chance to vote on whether to accept a settlement, and the judge found irregularities in that voting process.

“It wasn’t entirely clear what those irregularities were, but they were enough to convince him that it shouldn’t go forward,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.

In a statement, Johnson & Johnson said it won’t appeal the latest federal bankruptcy court ruling. Instead, it says it will litigate tens of thousands of claims in civil courts. 

Tobias is skeptical the courts can handle that. “That will be impossible in the system as it’s set up now, just could not take on that volume of cases,” he said.

J&J, Tobias added, might reach settlements, but that could take awhile. And plaintiffs have already waited four years as the company attempted to handle claims through bankruptcy court.

More than 60% of all purchases last year were made with a credit or debit card, according to the Federal Reserve. That’s up from 45% in 2016. That means big money for credit card companies, which made more than $187 billion last year in processing fees alone.

For businesses that take credit cards — especially smaller ones — it’s an increasingly large expense.

Mac Hay owns a bunch of seafood restaurants and markets on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and he said that credit card swipe fees are sort of like taxes.

“You just kinda take it as a fact. It’s sort of like, ‘Well, I guess we’re going to have to pay them. We’re going to have to pay the credit card processing fees,'” he said.

More than 90% of his customers pay with a card. It’s not like he’s not going to take them, so he doesn’t think about it much.

That is until the end of the month comes around, “and I see what we pay in credit card fees — it’s astronomical.”

Restaurants tend to have thin profit margins — maybe 5% or 10%.

For many, paying between 2% and 4% of every sale to process a card is tough, according to Erika Polmar, executive director and a cofounder of the Independent Restaurant Coalition.

“I talked to a restaurant last week who is paying $15,000 in swipe fees a month,” she said.

Bigger businesses can often negotiate slightly lower fees, but small ones don’t have the leverage.

Plus, “Visa and Mastercard dominate the credit card market in the U.S.,” Polmar said. “80% of credit card transactions are going through those two processors.”

So, she added, there’s not much pressure to offer competitive rates.

“My Economy” tells the story of the new economic normal through the eyes of people trying to make it, because we know the only numbers that really matter are the ones in your economy.

When Bryan Tetorakis co-opened his bar, Bad Medicine, in Cleveland, he had a vision for the music. “We don’t do any streaming whatsoever. No Spotify, no Tidal,” he said. Instead, music plays on vinyl records through the bar’s high-fidelity stereo system.

The year is off to a rough start for bars and restaurants, and price changes to ingredients like eggs have already caused Tetorakis to make recipe substitutions. “Egg white cocktails … people request them all the time. But egg whites cost about a dollar now, so it gets a little difficult.”

The foam on “Rocket Skates,” a Deftones song and Bad Medicine house cocktail, is now prepared with aquafaba, or simply, chickpea water.

To hear Tetorakis’ full story, use the media player above.

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“Changed little” was the theme of February’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary released Tuesday — 7.6 million job openings, 5.4 million hires, both about the same as in January. 

The numbers of quits and layoffs also didn’t change appreciably, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report.

February’s numbers reflect the earliest layoffs of federal workers — tens of thousands. But overall, the data shows what looks like a steady, decent labor market.

One item in today’s report did catch our attention, though: Layoffs were up at the smallest of small businesses — ones with fewer than 10 workers.

Eric Saunders, owner of Carolina Landscaping and Cleanup near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, has just a couple full-time employees. And with major question marks over how much his customers are willing to spend these days, he sure isn’t hiring.

“Yeah, holding steady. Unless the market changes to where people aren’t so worried about every little cent they have, it’s kind of hard to do anything right now with laborers,” said Saunders. 

Holding steady in the face of uncertainty was kind of the theme of Tuesday’s JOLTS report, said Ron Hetrick, senior labor economist with Lightcast.

“Workers don’t want to go anywhere. Employers don’t want to hire. Everybody just freezes,” said Hetrick. 

Really small businesses, though, were laying off workers at a higher rate than anyone else. Pavlina Tcherneva, an economist at Bard College, said that’s an indicator to watch. Because even though firms with fewer than 10 workers represent just about one-eighth of total employment, “to me, their behavior is bellwether for overall trends in the economy,” she said. 

That’s because small firms have no choice but to respond quickly to a changing economy, Tcherneva said. 

“A small business owner really is working day to day, month to month,” she said. “They don’t have savings, liquidity, access to credit nearly to the same extent as a big company would.”

So when small businesses feel the need to cut costs, reducing workforce is a tempting lever to pull, said Lindsay Owens, executive director of progressive think tank Groundwork Collaborative.

“Our measures of small business uncertainty have skyrocketed. And so for me, it is no surprise at all that we’re starting to see the layoffs in small businesses,” Owens said.

But sentiment has soured among businesses of all sizes, said Guy Berger of economic research nonprofit The Burning Glass Institute. It’s just that “a large enterprise is like, we always joke, is a supertanker, right? It takes time to turn around,” Berger said. 

So changes to headcount might take an extra month or two to play out.

Last week, President Trump announced his plans to impose a 25% tariff on all imported vehicles, light trucks and some auto parts. Those tariffs will go into effect on Wednesday, April 2.

This latest tariff is yet another addition to the bill of tariffs that the Trump administration has imposed over his first few months in office, and the inclusion of finished goods adds an extra layer of complexity to the already strenuous situation.

“If a large component of steel or aluminum is in the finished good, we basically need to break everything out into a bill of material, and then that 25% only applies to the steel or the aluminum,” said Gretchen Blough, a customs broker manger.

“Marketplace” host Kristin Schwab spoke with Blough about the current state of trade and how the addition of new tariffs creates further uncertainty for U.S. importers. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Kristin Schwab: Can you catch me up on what’s happened since we last heard from you? What is work like right now?

Gretchen Blough: Well, it’s a little crazy. We have the steel and aluminum tariffs that are in effect, and then we have a bunch of other tariffs that are going into effect tomorrow. The steel and aluminum, that has the 25% tariff on it with no exclusions, no exceptions. But there’s also some finished goods that have this tariff on it as well. If a large component of steel or aluminum in the finished good we basically need to break everything out into a bill of material, and then that 25% only applies to the steel or the aluminum, and then the rest doesn’t have the 25% so that’s presenting a problem for a lot of our importers. Because none of us were expecting that, and if they don’t have that information, then everything has the 25% apply to the entire good, which no one really wants that to happen either. But you have weigh what costs more the storage or the tariff at this point.

Schwab: Well, that’s a that’s a lot of ins and outs. How do you even, how do you even keep track of all the nitty gritty when the rules are constantly changing?

Blough: It’s not always easy. Mostly, we’re relying on the federal register when it’s updated. But that’s not always updated right away. We used to have fact sheets available on the government websites and those seem to have gone away. So, we’re relying on a lot of news publications to get a lot of the information as to how things are going to apply, because we don’t have things readily available. So, we’re trying to keep our customers up to date, and our operations folks up to date. And it’s not always easy to do that when we’re not quite sure what’s going to happen. For example, tomorrow, there’s scheduled to be 25% on Canada, Mexico, and also retaliatory tariffs, which we aren’t quite certain what those are going to include for other countries.

Schwab: So, I talked to a small-scale banana importer yesterday who was talking about how she just doesn’t have a lot of alternatives. She’s got to import from Mexico, right? What are you hearing from your clients about buying in America or buying American.

Blough: Well, you see that a lot on comments, on Facebook posts, but that’s not always realistic. There’s a lot of stuff that you can buy that’s made in America that has foreign components. And you know, it hurts manufacturers here, because now they have to pay more for their components. Buy American, It’s not an alternative. The other thing is if the manufacturing does come back to United States for these component parts, it’s going to take some time to build the plants and get things operational in order to source them here in the U.S.

Schwab: As somebody who has an intimate look on the ground of how tariffs are impacting businesses, also your own work, how much planning can you do for the next few months or the year ahead? Or is it just more of a day by day in the moment kind of workplace right now?

Blough: Well, it tends to be just an in the moment type thing. It’s really hard to plan when, as we saw with the tariffs with Canada and Mexico, they’re on again, they’re off again. They’re on again, they’re off again. You don’t know what’s going to happen from day to day sometimes. And plus, the retaliatory tariffs, we don’t even know what those are going to be.

Schwab: Do you have a long day ahead of you? What are your workdays like right now?

Blough: My workdays are answering a lot of questions. A lot of upset importers right now. I’m kind of explaining everything to everyone, having people that aren’t too happy because they had something on the water and in order to import it, it’s cost 25% more than they were expecting. And people trying to explain to me that they’ve had this purchased for six months. Why do they have to pay this now? And I really don’t have a good answer for them, because I’m just the messenger, unfortunately.

With the first three months of 2025 behind us, quarterly statements for 401(k)s, IRAs and other investment accounts will be arriving soon in mailboxes and inboxes across the country. They’ll be full of minus signs, showing how much investors have lost recently.

Now, we often talk about a “wealth effect” — basically, when the value of assets like stocks and homes goes up, folks feel richer, at least on paper, and they spend more because of it.

So, what about the opposite? Is there a negative wealth effect when people lose money on paper?

Things were going really well for the stock market, until they weren’t, said Rob Haworth, a senior investment strategist and senior vice president at U.S. Bank Asset Management.

“In the end of February, we had the S&P 500 touching new all-time highs, and we finished the quarter in negative territory for the year so far,” he said. The S&P 500 is down 4.5% and the Nasdaq is down 10%, as of March 31.

Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide, said there’ll be a psychological impact.

“When you see this sharp decline in equity prices, that’s the negative wealth effect. Consumers start to pull back,” she said.

But here’s the thing. For a lot of Americans, the majority of their wealth is in their homes.

“Latest data continue to show appreciation in home prices. So that — in terms of, like, a wealth effect — is still intact,” Bostjancic said.

And as for stocks, history shows that a sharp decline, followed by a quick rebound — like we’ve seen recently — doesn’t usually lead to a prolonged downturn, said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA Research.

But, he said, most small investors probably don’t know that. 

“They’re the ones that are most likely to allow their emotions to become their portfolio’s worst enemy,” he said.

One group that’s especially nervous right now: people 55 and up, who are seeing their retirement accounts decline in the midst of rising economic uncertainty, said Olivia Mitchell, a professor at the Wharton School.

“A lot of financial advisers advocate: Just ride the bumps, you’ll be all right in the long run,” she said.

Mitchell, over 70, is not really listening. “I myself got basically completely out of U.S. equities about two weeks ago,” she said.

As for whether recent losses on stocks will translate into less spending on stuff, Rob Haworth at U.S. Bank said declines of this magnitude don’t always squelch retail sales. 

“The biggest driver we see for consumer spending is really, do people have jobs? And are their incomes growing?” he said.

Bigger, he said, than any potential negative wealth effect from a falling stock market.  

One of the sectors bracing for another round of tariff announcements is agriculture. And on Tuesday morning, we got a window into how that’s affecting farmers’ and ranchers’ moods.

Purdue University’s Farmer Sentiment Index for March slipped on weaker expectations for the future, with 43% of farmers citing shifting trade policy as the top driver of their pessimism. 

Five-year expectations for ag export markets hit an all-time low for the survey. 

Farmers are used to dealing with the unknown, said Kristen Owen, managing director with the research firm Oppenheimer. 

“We usually think about uncertainty coming from weather, coming from pests,” said Owen. 

And we usually think of federal policy as insulating the farm economy from those chaotic forces. But right now, it’s piling on. 

Owen said farmers who were already stressed about breaking even in a tough commodity price environment now have bigger things to worry about. 

“Where do we send grain? And where do we send agricultural products globally?” said Owen. 

If countries targeted by the Trump administration tariffs respond with tariffs of their own, demand could fall for American corn and soybeans, and other ag exports. 

Michael Langemeier, who runs the Purdue survey, said it’s sort of surprising farmer sentiment wasn’t lower in March. 

“A lot of the respondents are thinking that yes, it looks like we’re going to have tariffs, they’re going to have a negative impact on farm income. But they’re expecting some compensation,” said Langemeier. 

Compensation like the billions in federal relief paid to farmers during the last Trump administration trade war. 

Two-thirds of respondents to the Purdue survey are expecting something similar. 

“Farmers would much, much rather have an open and fair and free market that we can sell our products to,” said Josh Gackle at the American Soybean Association. 

Gackle farms soybeans, corn and barley in Kulm, North Dakota, where he said the mood is pretty jittery. 

“If you go to the local cafe and you sit down at a table with neighbors, probably the first thing that comes up is what is the price of soybeans today? What’s the price of corn? What’s the price of wheat?” said Gackle. 

In his small town, Gackle said everyone’s livelihood is tied up in shifting trade policy. 

Cars are about to get more expensive in this country. President Donald Trump plans to impose a 25% tax on imported vehicles starting Wednesday. Parts will be subject to tariffs soon too.

That’s happening as the automotive industry is already phasing out some of its cheapest new vehicles. Specifically, the last two new models with starting prices under $20,000 could soon be gone, according to Car and Driver.

The Mitsubishi Mirage ended production in December. A company spokesperson told Marketplace that dealerships will likely have enough supply to sell the cars into this summer. Meanwhile, Nissan reportedly plans to discontinue its subcompact Versa after this year.

Those moves will continue a long-term trend among automakers toward larger, more expensive models, limiting budget-friendly options for consumers.

There’s nothing fancy about the 2024 Mitsubishi Mirage. It’s a small car available as a hatchback or a sedan. 

In the parking lot of the Mitsubishi dealership he owns near Burlington, Vermont, Tim Bedard showed the sedan version in black and listed some of its features.

“It has the power locks, the windows, cruise control, tilt steering wheel, air conditioning,” Bedard said. “It has enough amenities to make it comfortable.”

Mitsubishi dealership owner Tim Bedard thinks discontinuing the Mirage leaves a hole in the market for budget-conscious buyers. Behind him is a 2024 model. (Henry Epp/Marketplace)

But there was no getting around the fact that there’s just not a lot of room inside. The small size, Bedard said, contributes to its real selling points.

“The beauty of the car is: price tag, warranty, fuel efficiency.”

It starts at just over $18,000, it has a 10-year warranty and the hatchback version gets 39 miles per gallon (the sedan: 37 mpg) — better than any car that isn’t a hybrid.  

And that sticker price? It’s $30,000 less than the average new car right now, according to Kelley Blue Book. So, Bedard said, it makes sense that about a third of the new vehicles he sells are Mirages.

But they’re not likely to turn many heads.

“No one’s like, ‘Oh, wow, you have a Mirage. Wow, cool,’” said Clayton Seams of Toronto, Ontario. He owns a 2021 Mirage.

Seams is an editor with the Canadian automotive publication Driving. He had some strict criteria when he was shopping for his own car: He had $15,000 cash, he wanted to buy a car with a loan or lease, and he wanted something that was easy to drive and park in the city. The Mirage fit the bill. But it has its limitations.

“It’s very noisy at highway speed, and the stereo is honestly not very good,” Seams said.

Despite that, he really likes it.

“It just felt like driving a car from the ’90s,” he said. “It was simple, it had a manual transmission.  It was charming, in a way, of how basic it was.”

The Mitsubishi Mirage comes as a hatchback. Increasingly, automakers have replaced small hatchbacks with SUVs. (Henry Epp/Marketplace)

But basic is not what most car buyers are looking for these days.

“We like SUVs, trucks, vehicles with just more cargo capacity,” said Jessica Caldwell, head of insights at automotive site Edmunds. “So even if it is a bit on the smaller side, it still is more of an SUV format rather than a sedan format with a trunk.”

For years now, she said, sales of larger vehicles have been climbing. Demand for affordable, smaller cars, on the other hand, has been dropping off, “despite the fact that a lot of Americans are dealing with financial difficulties right now.”

Automakers have responded to that declining demand by dropping smaller vehicles from their lineups, Caldwell said. Small hatchbacks like the Ford Fiesta, Toyota Yaris and Honda Fit have all bitten the dust in the last five years.

But the change isn’t just about consumer preferences. Bigger vehicles are more profitable for car companies. That’s because making a subcompact isn’t all that much cheaper than making an SUV, according to Patrick Olsen, editor-in-chief at Carfax.

Some newer SUVs are even built on the same platform as the old subcompacts. Honda’s HR-V, for example, is the sibling of the discontinued Honda Fit. 

“So for not a lot more cost and material in terms of aluminum or steel to build a car, they could put a higher price tag on it because there’s more demand for that vehicle,” Olsen said.

Federal fuel economy regulations play a role too. The Trump administration is reviewing them, but right now, they require smaller vehicles to get better mileage than bigger ones. Olsen said that gives carmakers an incentive to go large. 

“It is a lot easier for automakers to build bigger SUVs, bigger pickup trucks, because it’s easier to meet those standards than it is for the smallest of vehicles,” he said.

Not everyone in the car industry is on board. Burlington Mitsubishi owner Tim Bedard thinks the increasing focus on larger vehicles has thrown the new-car market out of whack.

“With the influx of SUVs and crossovers that have taken over the market, we kind of lost sight [of the fact] that life was and has gotten very expensive for most people, and [they] can’t afford an average crossover or SUV of $30,000,” he said. “What’s the consumer do now?”

At least until the summer, Bedard expects to have Mirages available on his lot. After that, a used vehicle might be the price-conscious consumer’s best option. But they’re 32% more expensive than they were just before the pandemic.

It’s been five years since restaurants and other businesses around the country were required to close to the public because of COVID. It was abrupt and dramatic yet also feels like lifetimes ago.

But a lot of small businesses are still dealing with the financial fallout today — including the cost of repaying COVID-era loans they took out to survive in 2020 and 2021.

When the pandemic hit, Michael Shemtov owned 10 restaurants in Charleston and Nashville. He ended up closing a bunch of them, but not before taking out federal Economic Injury Disaster Loans to try to keep them open.

“I have $4,000 to $5,000 a month of payments that I make on loans that we took out during COVID to save restaurants that couldn’t be saved,” he said.

Pandemic loans are coming due for lots of restaurant owners at a time when business is slowing.

2021 and 2022 were great years for restaurants, according to Trevor Boomstra at AlixPartners. “People were all wanting to go out to restaurants to reconnect with their friends, spend money.”

But these days, he said that people are going out less and costs are up for almost everything.

Kurt Huffman owns the restaurant group ChefStable in Portland, Oregon, and said that some businesses are still waiting on money the federal government owes them for keeping staff employed during lockdown.

“It’s just a huge amount of money,” he said. “So I think that there’s kind of a financial tail.”

In the last year, he’s heard from a number of restaurant owners saying they want out.

“It’s just been too hard. We kind of dragged ourselves through the pandemic, and we’ve kind of survived,” he said. “But I think the question a lot of people are asking themselves is, ‘Is survival good enough?'”

The answer now for many, he said, is no.