Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

Okay, testing, testing.

It's Alexi.

It is Thursday, March 19th at 3.10 Pacific time.

I've just gotten to the, I think it's the Westfield Mall in Sherman Oaks, California.

And I am on a sort of pretzel mission.

I've talked to John Fisher up at Wetzel's Pretzels HQ.

He walked me through kind of the basics of how companies think about

when it makes economic sense to have a couple of franchise locations near each other.

But we've come here to get it straight from the franchisees mouth.

Okay, here goes nothing.

I've just parked and let's go find Ricky.

I thought it sounded elevated.

Yeah, it's fancy.

Yeah, I was like basically immediately intercepted by mall security who seemed to be kind of sensitive about having random podcasters wandering the halls recording stuff.

But I did convince them of the purity of my intentions.

And I even started asking them their opinion about this clustering of different types of stores like Wetzel's in the mall.

And they just seemed sort of like bored and confused enough that they just let me go.

And that's just about when I saw Ricky.

I see Ricky in the distance.

There we go.