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Well, there’s no, there’s no question about it. That, you know, the middle class is kind of a. A funky term. It’s a little bit fuzzy, right? Because middle kind of suggests it doesn’t necessarily, you know, it means, uh, you know, beauties in the eye of the beholder, as they say, but, you know, middle sort of means, well, you’re not poor, but you’re not rich.

Retail Unwrapped is a weekly podcast hosted by Robin Lewis and Shelley Kohan from The Robin Report. Each episode dives into the latest trends and developments in the retail industry. Join them as they discuss interesting topics and interview industry leaders, keeping you in the loop with everything retail.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining Retail Unwrapped, our weekly podcast. I’m Shelley Kohan, and we have a very exciting guest today, Arick Wierson, who actually has a fascinating background and very relevant to today’s topic on the impact. The election is going to have on retail so Arick you are a six time emmy award winning television producer You are a political analyst For newsweek magazine you were recently I believe interviewed  by governor tim waltz of minnesota  Who is the vp pick for democratic presidential candidate?

Kamala Harris. And you also served as a political advisor for former New York City mayor, Michael Bloomberg, for nearly a decade. So you have tons of experience and background. You write for CNN, you’re always in the news on what’s happening from a political front, and you also do a lot of worldwide consulting.

So I think you have this very global view of the world. And I’m very interested to hearing about your view on what this election means to retail, you know, specifically in the U. S., but also the world.  So welcome.  Thanks, Shelley. It’s great to be here.  So, uh, wow. What an election year. So I’ve done a lot of analysis in the past about trying to look at numbers and elections.

And I have to be honest with you, Arick, I never get like a true read on these numbers specifically relate to election years, so I’ve never been to really. Prove out that the elections have a direct impact on the numbers on the retail numbers in the U. S. market, and I think this year is a little bit different.

There’s a lot out there a lot going on. So let’s kind of start with talking about, you know, where are we today? And what has happened over the last few weeks in terms of the election?  Yeah, you know, I think  I’m sitting here, you know, in a suburb of Minneapolis in Minnesota. Um, obviously, you know, Minnesota is a place that’s got a lot of attention the last 24, 48 hours because our governor Tim Walz is, uh, the VP pick for Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket.

Um, I think there’s gonna be a lot of attention paid at Minnesota. And I’ll start right there with our topic, which is, you know, imagine a grocer. Who has a small little establishment in, let’s say, Winona, Minnesota, a little town you probably never heard of, down the Mississippi River, about 120 miles south of Minneapolis.

And then think about Brian Cornell, a name most of your viewers probably know, the CEO of the Target Corporation, also here in Minnesota, 120 miles north in  Minneapolis. Both of these guys consider themselves to be retailers. Obviously, Brian Cornell runs one of the largest retailers in the country. This small little grocer in Winona.

And I think it’s really hard to say, well, how is the election? How is the economy going to impact these two individuals in the same way? And I think it’s very different. I think that the types of things that are going to be important to a mega corporation, the spanning old four corners of the country, like target versus a small little retailer in a small little town in Minnesota can be very different.

And I think we need to keep that in mind when we talk about the impact of, uh, of the election or the economy.  On retailers, because, you know, retailers, as you know, it’s a very, very, very wide net. And I think the Robin report has been doing an excellent job of casting a wider net and not just focusing on sort of the Walmarts and Amazons and targets the world, but also thinking about the tires plus or the small little grocer or, you know, other other types of retail industries that are popping up.

So I think we really need to be careful and define what we’re talking about when we say retail in terms before we start defining how the economy or the election is going to impact them.  That’s a really good point. And I’m just going to add here. Well, first of all, hopefully Brian Cornell is listening to our podcast every week.

Uh, but, uh, so Target is a U S based company. And so they’re going to have probably a different view than let’s say Walmart. That’s a massively global company, right? So not just the,  not just the sole entrepreneur, but also even the bigger companies, it really depends their stake in terms of how big they are, how many countries they operate in.

And all of that. So I think that’s interesting. And I do agree with you. You know, they say 80 percent of the businesses are small businesses. Um, and, uh, I am actually going to go to Chicago. Uh, and, uh, later on today, actually, and I’m going to be at the ACE hardware convention, which will be really interesting.

I’m going to interview the CEO of ACE hardware. And that is a, you know, business where it’s like, all, all what you just described. They’re all store owners and they’re shareholders of the business and they all have a stake in kind of their own business. So let’s kind of talk a little bit about immigration policies and the impact that this is likely going to have on, let’s say, labor markets.

Yeah, certainly, you know, I think that, um, you know, the, the tough thing and I, and I, and I’ll try and be as sort of up the middle nonpartisan in my comments. Um, uh, but the tough thing in this particular election in terms of comparing policies, um, is that, you know, The Democratic ticket is put, put forth a pretty robust and complete plan in terms of starting with the Biden campaign, which is now transitioned into the Kamala Harris campaign, a robust set of sort of policies and missions and goals.

And, uh, the Republican side has been the information has been pretty sparse. I mean, they do have some platforms. They’ve tried to D platform, which was this project 2025, which was sort of like this, um, sort of. Very far right sort of think tank, you know, group think about sort of the types of policies and plans they wanted to put together

The Trump campaign has started to distance themselves from that. So, right now, it’s very hard to sort of discern what it is that the Trump campaign is fighting for from a policy perspective, particularly when you get into the nitty gritty. For example, uh, but broad strokes, clearly there’s a very big difference.

I’d say potentially there’s no bigger difference between the two parties in terms of how they’re thinking about immigration.  Certainly the Republicans, they have created this, in my opinion, uh, this sort of fear-mongering that, uh, you know, brought black and brown people are swarming across the Southern border and they’re taking jobs and they’re, you know, creating havoc.

And there’s, uh, there’s some of them are violent criminals and this needs to be shut down. I think the democratic approach has obviously been a little bit more, you know,  similar in the sense that they need to, they understand there needs to be a better, better controls the border. There needs to be a better asylum process.

There needs to be a massive reform when it comes to immigration and naturalization,  but by and large, I think that the Democrats see immigrants.  By and large as, as a positive thing. They see that as the continuance of a trend that has sort of built this country from the very first European immigrants that came to this country.

Um, obviously there’s been different waves of immigration throughout our history, and they’ve always seen that, that, you know, there’s usually a generation that, you know, it’s struggles to assimilate, but there it’s their children that then become the next generation of Americans. And, and as we’ve seen, you know, uh, Joe Biden.

Is the product of Irish immigrants, which were sort of that, you know, sort of unloved generation of immigrants that came in some, you know, in the mid to late 1800s. So I think that, you know, the country is going through a transition. I think the difference here, obviously, is that these types of immigrants that are coming in, by and large, look a lot different than the typical immigrants that have been European of European descent.

But how does this impact the retail sector? I think that there’s actually going to be some massive impacts. I think that one of the things that I always struggled to understand is that You know, if we do not have fresh labor coming in, and it’s largely unskilled labor, who is going to take on these sort of menial jobs that right now, many different industries depend on, you know, that’s people that work, you know, in supermarkets.

It’s people that work, you know, picking tomatoes in tomato fields in California. Um, you know, these are the people that are cleaning our buildings, you know, again, these are people that are, they’re coming here to pursue the American dream. As you cut that off, you know, who’s going to take those jobs. And I think obviously the answer is 1 of 2 things, either automation, although I think that’s something that, you know, is more of a dream than a reality at this point, you know, with robotics and how AI is going to take up, take over a lot of these different things.

And, or the second thing is it’s going to have to be sort of low skilled, uh, Americans, which are, but are going to expect a different, uh, differentiated wage. And they are going to, that’s going to have inflationary pressures and put more, more cost structure to, to major retailers. So I think, you know, it’s a really difficult position to defend if you are sort of looking at the, the, the sort of the Republicans way of really just cutting off the border, you know, cutting, cutting immigration, you know, down to, down to a mere trickle.

Versus where the Democrats are taking a much sort of, I think, measured, uh, and responsible approach to the immigration issue.  I think it’s also interesting when you taught you the way that you just explained, you know, people coming into the country and the, the big, uh, mix of people that are coming in.

And I look at it from a consumer perspective and we actually had a podcast about the new general market and the new general market is a very mixed race market. It’s multicultural, and it is. You know, pretty soon the new general market, which is going to be black indigenous people of color, they will become the majority race in the United States.

So, uh, I’m just, you know, a little baffled by here’s your consumer market and you know,  what’s going to happen when you have this very diverse consumer market. If, if we don’t have, you know, people working in jobs that are similar to the shoppers that are shopping in stores. Does that make sense? So interesting.

Shelley is. You know, I think something that both parties have gotten wrong, um, to, to different degrees and for different reasons over the past, say, 20 to 30 years is the reason that we have a crisis on our southern border is not because, I mean, we do have a problems in terms of our, uh, our, our immigration process and there’s no, there’s no question about it.

I think both parties, you know, measured people on both sides of the aisle would agree. But I think that the real issue is that the United States needs to be more active in promoting economic stability and democracy. You know, up and down Latin America and across the world. I mean, the people that are coming across the southern border, they’re not just Central Americans or people from Colombia and Ecuador and other places.

A lot of them are people from other places in the Caribbean, like Haiti, but also lots of people from Africa, from Southeast Asia, from China and elsewhere, people that are fleeing persecution from around the world or are looking for economic betterment. So I think. The US that this really the immigration issue is sort of one side of what I would call the foreign policy issue on the other side, which is, I think, the American agenda, which, you know, again, go back to the Republicans or the Democrats.

The Republicans seem to be very inward looking isolationist. Wanting to focus on America, not wanting to engage in foreign conflicts or, or give away too much foreign aid to different countries, not really looking at, um,  fostering the alliances with our traditional allies and with, with new allies. And I think that that really is going to only exacerbate the immigration issue because, you know, if, if a lot of these countries are teetering on the brink authoritarianism, we’re seeing that right now.

In Venezuela. Venezuela is a, is uh, is a huge source of turbulence in the region. Uh, you know, I don’t know if you’ve been following this, but you know, Maduro had sort of a sham election. declared he won. The U. S. has already come out and said the opposition won and won very decisively. And up to a third of Venezuelans have said that if Maduro continues in power, already several hundred thousand, I think up to a half a million Venezuelans have fleed since the Chavez regime to the United States.

States. That means another couple 789 million Venezuelans might be leaving the country. Many of them will look to come first to the United States. If the United States doesn’t have a more active foreign policy, it’s just going to only exacerbate the immigration issue at the southern border. And so I think that it’s one thing to sort of try and close off.

It’s like it’s like you’ve got water rushing towards a dam. You know, but, uh, you, you know, the, you have to keep on building a bigger, bigger dam if there, if there’s more and more water fleeing, you know, coming towards that dam. So I think, you know, really, it’s hard to talk about the immigration issue without talking about American foreign policy.

Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And I, you don’t mind if I quote you, do you? Cause I want to quote something you said, which is. Don’t forget that retailers don’t check your passport when you’re shopping So some retailers grocers mass market retailers, etc could really feel the pinch if there is massive deportation. Absolutely.

I mean, you know, I think that the you know, the the trump campaign has said they want to deport up to something like 12 million Uh, illegal immigrants. I mean, can you imagine the, the, the drain that that’s going to have, particularly, you know, a lot of them are going to be constant. They’re going to be all over the country, but a lot of it will be concentrated in Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, et cetera, Florida for for sure.

Can you imagine the impact that’s going to have on retailers across across those states? I mean, it’s going to be massive. If that were to actually come to fruition. I personally think that’s actually just It’s Uh, sort of campaign malarkey. It’s not really going to happen. There’s no way that could, that could possibly happen.

Separating all those families. I mean, you would, you would have, you would have a crisis, a monumental national crisis, you know, the likes of with no one, no one’s ever seen before. But I, but just the fact that they’re suggesting such a thing. I mean, no one’s really done the math, but, you know, what is the economic sort of contribution of those 12 million people?

Maybe they’re, maybe they’re not contributing to social security. Maybe they’re not paying taxes, but they’re spending money. They’re spending money on some things. And that’s certainly a lot of that’s going into the retail sector.  Yeah, certainly a consideration for sure. Okay, so let’s shift gears because I know trade policies probably very greatly on the two campaigns.

How do you see this panning out  again? There’s, you know, I think there’s, there’s a pretty stark difference. You know, I think that going back to what I was saying earlier about sort of, uh,  Alliances and free trade. I mean, the Republicans used to be the party of free trade. They wanted to open up free trade deals, whether it was NAFTA or different trading arrangements with Southeast Asia or obviously, uh, with Europe and the Republicans seem hell bent in terms of really, uh, forcing American companies to look inward.

They want to. I think there’s one proposal that’s out there.  That they want to tax all imports from China up to 100%. I mean, can you imagine what that would do to inflation in this country if that were to ever come to fruition? Now, again, we need to be very careful. We need to separate what is sort of campaign bluster from actual policy, but still the idea that they’re thinking that they can really, you know, start, you know, putting these massive Uh, surcharges or tariffs on top of Chinese imports.

I mean, the U. S. and the Chinese economies are so interwoven and so fundamentally integrated to this day that it’s almost impossible to think about separating the two. Uh, they depend on each other, you know, very much so. And so I think that, you know, again, the, the Republicans have sort of this inward looking America first, uh, let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s tax the hell out of China in terms of trade policy.

Whereas I think the Democrats are going to take a much more measured approach.  Yeah, that’s all very interesting and I’m sure that, uh, some of the bigger corporations that have those global ties are certainly looking at all, all of what’s happening in terms of, you know, policies and tariffs and taxes and how that’s going to impact their businesses.

Um, what about economic policies? What do you have to say about economic policies in the U. S.?  Well, I mean, certainly I think that, um, there are some fundamental difference here, differences here between Republicans and Democrats as well, um, you know, certainly, uh, Democrats are going to be fighting for the middle class.

They’re going to be fighting, uh, for higher minimum wage. Certainly, those are the types of policies that are going to put more pressure immediately on the bottom line of industries that employ a lot of minimum wage workers. And of course, Uh, raising the minimum wage tends to have a cascading effect across all different levels of employment.

So even if you’re a middle manager, to a certain degree, you can argue that, you know, if the lowest rung employees of a certain corporation are getting paid a little bit more, that that might have an inflationary impact, you know, cascading across the company’s payroll. Um, so certainly that may have a more immediate impact, I think, on the bottom line of, A lot of companies across a lot of industries.

I think retail, you know, which intends to employ a lot of minimum wage or near minimum wage workers would be sort of the most adversely affected. On the other hand,  you know, giving more minimum wage, you know, raising the minimum wage will have an impact in terms of giving some of these families a little bit more spending power.

Not, you know, a lot of these, a lot of these families are basically underwater or just at the brink. And, you know, giving them a little bit of more discretionary income might mean that they’re spending a little bit more. So it’s really kind of hard to model out and exactly see what the impact would be. I mean, certainly, I think, you know, the, the, the extra spending, that’s going to be something that would probably be seen over, you know, a 2 or 3 year period.

Whereas I think the immediate impact of a national minimum wage increase, I think, would be almost immediate on the bottom lines of a lot of these companies. So, but in general, I would say that the, the, the Democrats are very much, uh,  Concerned with empowering the middle class, they feel that the middle class is something that’s sort of evaporated in this country that we’re having, you know, the uber ultra high net worth ultra rich on one hand.

And then we’ve got a more and more parts of the swaths of America are falling into the near, near  or just above the poverty line. And I think that they want to do is yeah, Is, is create a set of economic policies that, you know, whether it be in terms of tax rates, in terms of, uh, uh, minimum wage, in terms of other sort of major macroeconomic policies that can actually uplift, you know, big sections of the, uh, of the American population.

So let me ask you a question. So there’s been a lot of talk about this middle class and the middle class going away. And do you have a view on that based on, uh, your background, everything you’re seeing, maybe your global view of the world, like what’s happening with the U S middle class?  There’s no, there’s no question about it that, you know, the middle class is, is a kind of a, a funky term.

It’s a little bit fuzzy, right? Because middle kind of suggests, it doesn’t necessarily, you know, it means, uh, you know, beauties in the eye of the beholder as they say. But, you know, middle sort of means, well, you’re not.  Poor, but you’re not rich, but what’s happened in this country is that the rich have become uber rich and we have people that are now worth over 100 billion dollars in this country.

We have a top, you know, 0. 1%, which, you know, owns, you know, and it controls something like 20 or 30 percent of the national economy, the top 0. 1%. And so if you think about if you take that as your, your, your ceiling, and then you look at people that are living around the poverty level as floor. Your middle should be a lot higher.

And so people are looking at that saying, well, I’m not middle class because I’m certainly not making four or 500 a year. Uh, you know, maybe I’m not even making 100, 000 a year. And I think that, you know, the inflation has obviously made people a lot more. Um, uh, cognizant of their economic status and their economic situation.

Certainly, I think that, uh, you know, we, we lived the last 20, 25 years in a, you know, in a marketing environment that has really promoted this idea of, of lavish spending and, and, uh, looking up to those that have the loss of discretionary income and live these outrageous lifestyles. Social media has certainly played a big role, I think, in cementing, you know, that that sense that you’re losing ground because a lot of people see what on social media, maybe what they’re seeing isn’t actually true.

I mean, how many times have we seen some major star on social media that we find out, you know, he’s not living in the lap of luxury. He’s, you know, he’s borrowing his friend’s house who happens to be a real estate agent to like pretend like he’s living in this, you know, 20,000 square foot mansion in Beverly Hills.

But in reality, he’s just, you know, you know, basically showing up for the day and setting up shop with his camera. But at the end of the day, I think what we’re finding is that there’s, uh, two things happening. One is certainly there’s been this, this exacerbation of wealth in this country, which is creating this, this larger and larger dichotomy between the haves and the have nots, uh, the middle class certainly hasn’t kept up with that in terms of, you think of middle as being an average or a mode, if you will, in terms of these, these, these two end points of, of, uh, Of the economy, but on the on top of that, I think that, you know, the we layer in the impact that social media and marketing and a lot of that and the retailers are responsible for a lot of that that marketing, I think, has also led to a lot of people to feel that, you know, they’re constantly in want.

They’re constantly lacking things that they feel that they’re taught or they’re marketed to that they’re that they need. And so I think that’s creating a lot of frustration as well. And then, of course. Yeah. Uh, hovering above this entire conversation of this inflationary pressures. I mean, there’s been no question, uh, that inflation has been a big issue and it’s made a lot of sort of everyday items a lot more expensive and people have noticed that whether it’s gas or groceries or other sort of daily items.

They certainly have, and I’ll say that your point on consumerism is exactly right on. We’ve created kind of this monster of consumerism, and every year I think, okay, this is going to be the year where we’re going to really slow down consumerism. People are going to stop. People are going to slow down. Uh, but I really think it’s going to be Gen Alpha that may actually have the biggest impact on reducing, you know, consumerism in the U.S. market.

I just think that. You know, we’ve created this. And so you’re right. Social media just feeds into it. It feeds into it and it makes people feel like they need more. Uh, so they go out there, they buy more, there’s more consumerism, uh, and the haves and the have nots, there is a bigger separation and you’re right about, you know, the middle class.

It’s certainly not the average of the two spectrums as you described. So, you know, Shelley, I have a daughter who’s 19 and she’s, uh, she, she’s going to college in Europe, actually in the Netherlands. And she’s a Gen Z, you know, born in 2005. And, um, what I think is really interesting is she is a Gen Z is the first digitally native generation.

Um, I think younger millennials, some of them might fit into this category, but certainly older millennials, you know, can remember times before, you know, Blackberries and, and Facebook and all those types of things, but, you know, she doesn’t really know a world where you didn’t have a phone, a smartphone, where you didn’t have, uh, you know, some sort of social media.

Um, and you know, what’s really interesting is that she’s a lot, and I think she’s not alone. Um, I think she’s a smart girl. So my daughter, of course, but, uh, but she, um, you know, she’s not alone. A lot of her friends have a very cynical view about a lot of, a lot of this consumerism and this, this constant push.

And so it’s, a lot of times I’m sitting with her, we’re watching TV or we’re looking at something online and she’s just very sardonic and very sort of cynical about sort of this blatant push to. Push product on, you know, onto U. S. Consumers, and she kind of has a very negative reaction to that. So I think You know, it’s going to be Gen Z that may actually, if there is an opportunity to sort of reverse this trend towards consumers, there may be Gen Z that actually says, hey, you can’t pull the wool over my eyes anymore.

I think that’s great. That’s more optimistic than my view. And of course, my son’s also 19. Um, and very similar to what your daughter, and I think one of the things we have seen with Gen Z is this kind of introduction of these new businesses. The, you know, re, resell market has been very big. The vintage shopping, the reuse, the circular economy.

So those are all positive things. It just takes so long to really put those into action to make an impact on the  the other thing. Yeah. I think that Gen Z also has, um, an innate, There’s two things I would say that are very unique about Gen Z and worth highlighting. I think one of them is  Gen Z.  And I think this goes across.

This isn’t just my daughter. Uh, and I don’t really know what her politics are. I mean, I think she’s probably center, maybe center left, but I’m not sure. Um, she’s certainly doesn’t wear it on, you know, on her sleeve, like, you know, maybe older generations do, but. But she clearly, and I think this is true for her friends, even her friends that are clearly center right or even far right, they all have this innate sense of doom when it comes to climate and climate change and the planet.

And I think that they, in their minds, maybe they don’t make this connection maybe as viscerally as I’m about to make it, but they certainly understand that there is a link between this rabid consumerism and the destruction of the planet and climate change and global warming. And I think that to that extent,  They’re very cognizant of some of these things.

And the other thing I would say, uh, that is really unique about generation about Gen Z is that they don’t see the world through these sort of, uh, myopic blocks. And so, for example, that someone is trans or LGBTQ, LGBTQ, or they’re, they come from, they’re biracial or they, You know, they do this or they do that, and they have all these different, they, they see that it’s sort of like this big, beautiful sort of, uh, panoply of different personalities and profiles of people that, you know, are part of the, of the world that they live in.

They don’t sort of tend to, to block out all these people in different ways. I think that’s a, that’s a huge generational shift from even millennials and certainly from Gen X, which I’m a Gen Xer and a far cry from boomers and, and the greatest generation, which are our oldest Americans right now. So I, I do think that we are on the precipice as Gen Z continues to gain back to our topic.

More political power. I mean, we have our first Gen Z congressman, uh, right now from Florida. Uh, there’s going to be obviously a lot more Gen Z years coming up in the political ranks. And I think that is going to shift the national conversation over the next 15, 20 years dramatically in this country in terms of the types of policies, how they think about immigration, how they think about,  trade, how they think about economic policy, how they think about foreign policy.

I think the country is, is on the precipice of a major democratic shift. And I think that that’s scary to a lot of traditionalists and conservatives in this country, because they see not only the face of America, you mentioned how, you know, America is going to be a, a non, non white majority country, uh, you know, in the next, next couple of years, but not only that.

America is about to become a country that has a very different sort of, uh, um, a moral and, and sort of ethical compass, uh, in, in terms of how they see the world in the, in the next 10 to 15 years. I think that’s scary to, to a lot of traditionalists.  Yeah, you’re absolutely right. But they do. You’re so right on the lens of Gen Z.

They just see the world differently. They just look at a different lens. It’s wonderful, I think, because, uh, I think it brings a whole new perspective to the world.  And just to go back on what you said on economic policy, so it’s a real conundrum with retailers because they are, want, they want to.  Make sure people are getting paid a fair wage and good working conditions and they want to increase the minimum wage, but then that also those then increase really the price of goods and operating costs.

So the operating costs go higher and so the prices go up and so that might then. Actually do the reverse and lessen the sales. Right. But I think, and what about you take a com, a company like you mentioned too earlier, Walmart and Target. I mean, who, you know, I don’t know, you, you maybe you know the, with more precise numbers than I do, but you know, I don’t know what percentage of their product mix is coming directly or indirectly from China.

And imagine if there is, let’s say it’s not a hundred percent, but let’s even say it’s a 10% increase on Chinese imports, if that, if were, that were to come to fruition, what does that do? To their cost structure, are they going to be able to pass 100 percent of those costs on to consumers? What’s that going to do to inflation?

You know, what’s that? What’s that inflation going to do to the consumer spending power? You know, all of these things are interconnected. And and I think that, um, you know, if I, if I was a retailer right now, I would, you know, on one hand. I love the idea if I’m, let’s say, I’m a retailer, you know, that Republicans talk about lowering regulations, uh, making it easier to do business, all those types of things, which are traditional, sort of the bread and butter issues for, for the Republican Party.

On one hand, I like that, but on the other hand, I would be very scared about some of these major shifts that Republicans, particularly at the national level, are talking about, uh, because, you know, that could have almost, uh, that would be a sea change in terms of your, your cost structure to your basic operating business.

You’re absolutely right. And what’s interesting is that I had Bayard Winthrop on. I don’t know if you know him, but he’s the CEO of American Giant. He built his company American Made. He wants to use the textiles in America and all the work is American. And WalMart recently partnered with him and his company, American Giant, to create a t shirt for Walmart, which is American Made.

And what I, what struck me as super interesting and so real is that Baird in the interview we had on Retail Unwrapped with him, he talked about, you know, we talk about fair wages, we talk about working conditions, we talk about all these, worker safety, all these things that Americans value as You know, for the American worker, which raises the wages and then we, you know, go offshore to get cheaper labor that doesn’t uphold those same standards, which I found just a very interesting view on, you know, globalization and outsourcing.

Yeah, you know, there’s this concept, you know, in trade about what we also call friend shoring. I mean, we’ve heard about onshore and nearshoring and the new term, the new buzzword is friend shoring. I don’t know if you’ve heard that, that term. And, you know, the idea is that we should Uh, promote, uh, international trade with our friends, you know, our friends in terms of our that we have strategic alliances with or trade agreements, uh, and with that comes obviously a set of expectations in terms of how other foreign countries are dealing with child labor, or they’re dealing with minimum wages, or they’re dealing with workers rights and the right to syndicate and unionization and so on and so forth, um, you know, and so I think that, you know, what we’re the other thing that we may start seeing, um, is that a lot of, you know, Uh, a lot of these traditional places, whether it be Southeast Asia, China, other places, a lot of that manufacturing might shift to closer, closer countries where there is sort of a lower input costs, but there happens to be strategic alliances with the United States.

I’m thinking of places like China. Like Guyana, which happens to be a huge major energy partner for the United States and has a lot of low skilled labor that could potentially be doing a lot of things to support sort of US manufacturing places in Central America. And I think that that goes part and parcel with what I was saying earlier, which is this idea of using trade and using the might of American consumers to actually help fortify some of these fledgling economies and create sort of more stable places where people have more economic  opportunity and they’re not necessarily looking to always come up to the United States and leave their home country.

That’s fascinating. Any closing points that you have and also where can our listeners find you?  Well, I’m not in the habit of giving out my home address.  I’m not going to share people where they can find me physically, but you know, of course, just Google me. I mean, I’m all over the place. I, like you said, I write a regular column for Newsweek magazine.

Uh, I, I, I contribute to CNN quite regularly, New York Daily News, The Observer, uh, where I’m talking more about sort of business and technology and the intersection of, of AI in terms of, of those, uh, those two topics. Um, I actually have a, you know, I don’t know if you know this Shelley, but I have a, a, um, almost a daily, it’s a weekly show, but it certainly it’s been almost daily this, uh, the last couple of months, uh, in Brazil where I, where I talk about U.S. politics and global international politics for Brazilian audiences.

So if you have any Portuguese speakers out there, they can, uh, tune in to my show on Ecebete, which is the second largest TV network in Brazil. Um, so just Google me.  And you also write for the Rom Report, too. You’re one of our fantastic writers.

I do. I do. You know, we didn’t talk about this, but, you know, um, the reason I write for the Rom Report, and people who watch this may be saying, well, you know, what does Arick, what does he know about retail? But I actually, when I left  New York City after working for Mike Bloomberg for, like you said, almost a decade.

My first job was to start a new TV station in Portuguese speaking Africa, in Angola. And I was there and I started this TV station, the first private TV station in the country, in partnership with a big Brazilian network. Um, but then after a couple of years, I handed that over to the local authorities and to the local investors.

And I was about to come back to the country and one of the major investors that had been part of the TV station efforts said, Hey, would you be interested in doing something completely outside of your wheelhouse? Um, but start the, the country’s first major shopping center, the first shopping mall, essentially retail, retail fashion mall.

And I took that challenge, you know, by the horns and I had to learn And all the basically the ins and outs, not only the construction because we had to build this place, but also understanding the retail business and going over to Asia and and finding suppliers and figuring out the best way to do supply chain and figuring out how to train staff and hiring sort of specialists for merchandising.

And I ran the gamut of all the different things, you know, basically starting a major retail enterprise with very little base knowledge other than as a consumer. Uh, and having to learn the industry in a very challenging environment, like, uh, like sub Saharan Africa. So that’s kind of like my perspective that I bring to the retail, uh, the retail industry.

And that’s what I try and bring to the report. I’m gonna end where I started with. You are truly one of the most interesting people, seriously, in my realm, in my world, for sure. So, thank you so much. And that’s coming from the daughter of CIA agents, right? That’s right. That’s exactly right. Uh, thank you so much, and thanks for being on Retail Unwrapped.

It’s great having you here. Uh, next week we have a really interesting podcast with Mark Kohan. Mark Kohan is the former, uh, worked at Columbia University as a professor there for the, um, upper division master’s program and also former CEO of Sears. And we’re going to talk about the Sachs Niemann’s potential merger if it gets approved.

We might also talk a little bit about the Supreme Lysatka and what’s happening with that. So don’t miss out on Retail Unwrapped for next week. Thank you for listening to Retail Unwrapped. We’ll be back in one week with another podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast service.

If you have questions, ideas for a podcast or anything else. Please contact us via the robinreports.com.