There's no business like dough business
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Why are there multiple Wetzel's Pretzels locations at the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center Station?
This week on NPR's Newsmakers, Maine Senate candidate Graham Plattner, a working class Democrat leaning into one message, that the political system is rigged to favor the wealthy.
There's only one direction we need to be pointing fingers, and that is up. It's not left and right.
Can that message help Democrats take the Senate in this year's midterms? Graham Plattner, this week on NPR's Newsmakers. Watch or listen wherever you get podcasts.
This is Planet Money from NPR.
A few months back, Planet Money got a little economic bat signal from our friends over at the podcast Hyperfixed. Hyperfixed is hosted by one of my longtime favorite radio heads, Alex Goldman. He was previously one of the hosts of Reply All. And for each episode, Hyperfixed takes on listener problems, big and small, and sets out to solve them.
Yeah, we get questions as small as a listener said, hey, my favorite bakery shut down and now I can no longer get the cake that I love. So we got Claire Saffitz, baker extraordinaire, to help us figure out the recipe.
Love that question.
And we also get questions like, should I have children? Which, as you might imagine, is a more difficult question to answer.
Yeah, that's a bigger, scarier one. But thank you for looking into it.
Yeah, I do my best. But the question that made us think of you guys was from a listener named Jed Kronfeld, because he wanted to talk about his local subway stop.
To call it just a subway station, it's underplaying it a little bit.
Jed's lived in Brooklyn for the last five years, and the question on his mind had to do with the Atlantic Avenue Barclays Center Station.
It connects like nine or ten different lines, and then it leads to a terminal for the Long Island Railroad. And then on top of that is a whole other layer that is a mall.
And to understand Jed's question, you first have to understand what this complex looks like. The Atlantic Avenue Barclays Center Station is consistently ranked as the number one busiest station in Brooklyn. And the reason it's so busy is because this one hub connects downtown Brooklyn to the rest of New York City. It's home to a massive arena. The Brooklyn Nets play there. It's a huge concert venue where you can see artists like Bad Bunny, Bruce Springsteen, Charlie XCX. So the subway station itself is super bustling. It's got multiple levels. And then on top of that, you have a shopping mall. And it's in this Escher-like maze that Jed first noticed something strange.
On the upper end, in the mall, there is one Wetzel's Pretzels. And it looks like any Wetzel's Pretzels. And then within the system, on the top floor, there is a Wetzel's Pretzels. And on the bottom floor, there is another Wetzel's Pretzels. And the spaces that they're in, they look like no larger than a broom closet. It just kind of doesn't make sense. I don't know how you set up one place like that, much less two. Much less a third location.
If you were to walk a circuit between all of them, how far away are they from one another?
You could get to all of them within a minute. It's really that quick.
Wow. When did you notice that there were three Wetzel's Pretzels locations?
By the time I moved into Brooklyn, the one in the mall that was already there, and then about... Two years ago, the other two moved in. I don't know if they moved in at the same time, but they definitely moved in within the same month. I'm like, what are we doing? This is excessive.
Underneath Jed's skepticism, there are three questions. First, he wants to understand why there are three Wetzel's pretzels clustered so close together in the Atlantic Barclays station. Second, he wants to know if they're competitors or collaborators. And third, he wants to know if any of these locations are actually turning a profit. And we started looking into this and it turned out the Atlantic Avenue Barclays Station was not the only instance of this sort of Wetzel's cluster. Turns out there are also three Wetzel's pretzels at the American Dream Mall in New Jersey. At the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, California, there are three Wetzel's pretzels.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Why are there multiple Wetzel's Pretzels locations at the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center Station?
0:00–5:17
2
What unique challenges do franchisees face in high-traffic areas?
5:17–11:19
3
How does Wetzel's Pretzels' business model differ from other franchises?
11:19–16:48
4
What role does impulse buying play in Wetzel's Pretzels' strategy?
16:48–22:14
5
Are the Wetzel's locations competitors or collaborators?
22:14–27:36
6
How does foot traffic impact the profitability of Wetzel's Pretzels?
27:36–28:54