Claire Saffitz

speaker

254 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 3 Jun

Claire Saffitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Planet Money · There's no business like dough business · 3 Jun 2026 podcast

Okay, so remember a couple minutes ago when Alexei was talking about how this question might be the key to understanding not just why there are clusters of Wetzels, but why there are clusters of Starbucks and McDonald's and all of these other brands that we see lining the streets of American cities?

Well, John can't actually speak to the other real estate strategies behind those other companies because obviously he doesn't work for those other companies.

But what he can say with 100 percent certainty is that the real estate needs of Wetzel's pretzels are pretty different from the needs of those other companies because pretzels just aren't the kind of product that people go out of their way to buy.

In the world of retail, there's a name for this kind of thing.

It's called an impulse product.

And unlike destination products, which are the kind of things people go out into the world with the intention of buying, impulse products are defined by the fact that nobody's really planning on buying them.

So how do you get people to buy something they didn't plan to buy?

For Wetzel's, it's all about bringing pretzels to the people.

It's about placing their storefronts in high traffic, high visibility areas where people are already walking around, and then placing additional storefronts along that same route to create as many opportunities for repeat exposure as the location can feasibly sustain.

It's a strategy of attrition, of delicious olfactory attrition.

I mean, obviously this part makes sense, right?

The more these pretzels are in your face, the more their smell is in your nose, the more likely you are to buy this thing you didn't intend to buy.

But the real question for us is, aren't all of these Wetzels eating into each other's profits?

Or are they somehow immune to the laws of supply and demand?

One of the other big factors undergirding this model is that corporate Wetzels will not let different franchisees open storefronts under the same roof.

So anytime you see a cluster of Wetzel's pretzels in the wild, know that every storefront under the same roof is owned by the same person.

They aren't actually competing with each other.

And any cannibalization that's happening has been at least partially planned.

Also, some franchisees will open additional locations in the same space just to make sure that those spaces don't get taken by the competition.

So these clusters function more like a defensive mapping sort of strategy.

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