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

The other big thing is that the company gets final approval on all franchise locations.

And because they've had the most success in malls and transport hubs and event spaces, that's where most of these clusters will be.

So now we know why these locations are clustered so close together.

That is to say, we know why they're there in theory.

But we still wanted to know if this strategy was actually working in the Atlantic Barclays Station.

Were the three storefronts actually making money?

And we knew just who we had to ask.

After the break, answers from the man behind the Atlantic Avenue Wetzels.

Okay, so this is a little off story, but it made me laugh so much that I wanted to share.

Alexi, you're not much of a mall rat.

I'm not.

You didn't grow up going to the mall.

I actually heard you pronounce Sbarro, Shbarro, which is a huge red flag for mall rats like me.

So I wasn't surprised to learn that just minutes after you walked into the mall with recording gear and a giant microphone, you got stopped.

Ricky's been a Wetzel's franchisee for the last 20 years.

And the way he tells it, pretzels were kind of like his gateway to his American dream.

After moving from L.A.

to Bangladesh back in the early 90s, Ricky worked a series of odd jobs.

But in his heart, there was always one goal, to have a business of his own.

So Ricky opened a liquor store, which failed miserably.

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