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 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

And for several years, it felt like getting the best of all of these worlds.

And then COVID hit.

And like so many other businesses in the city, the Atlantic Terminal Wetzel's was forced to shut down.

But the thing is that when the store reopened three months later, the pre-pandemic business just didn't come back.

Because of this long-term lease, Ricky was forced to leave the lights on.

And for the next couple years, he took a loss at the Atlantic Avenue location.

And then, one day a few years ago, the landlord came to Ricky with a proposition.

He said that he had a couple of retail locations available inside the subway terminal.

one on the first floor and one on the second.

These locations were about the size of broom closets, and they didn't have kitchens.

And technically, they were only about 100 feet from one another.

But because they were inside the subway station, they could do something that the mall location couldn't, cater to commuters directly.

Ricky didn't really want to take on both locations, but it was an all-or-nothing deal.

So Ricky took both, and his fortunes began to change.

What Ricky's saying is that unlike almost all the other Wetzel's properties he owns, the Atlantic Barclays cluster is actually so close together, he can run three locations out of one kitchen, which drastically reduces his operating costs, or at least his cost per location.

Also, even though these satellite locations are physically close together, because they're on different platforms, they're actually serving different groups of customers.

So no matter which way you're moving inside the Atlantic Barclays station, you're going to pass one of Ricky's Wetzel's pretzels.

Ricky told Alexi that his Wetzel's locations in the Atlantic Avenue Barclays station were, in fact, moving a lot of dough.

But we decided to do a little data collecting of our own.

So on a random day in the middle of the week, we sent Hyperfix producer Amor Yates to the station and asked her to spend some time simply watching the Wetzels.

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