Pretzels to the People

Summary

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Hyperfixed – "Pretzels to the People"

Host: Alex Goldman
Date: May 7, 2026
Podcast Network: Radiotopia
Summary by Hyperfixed Podcast Summarizer

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Episode Overview

This episode of Hyperfixed dives into what initially appears to be a minor, quirky annoyance reported by a listener: Why are there three Wetzel's Pretzels located so close together at the Atlantic Avenue–Barclays Center subway station in Brooklyn? Host Alex Goldman takes this oddball inquiry and explores the surprisingly complex business logic, city infrastructure, and economic theories underpinning the clustering of such franchises—not just in Brooklyn, but across America. With help from business reporter Alexi Horowitz Ghazi (Planet Money), Wetzel’s Pretzels’ corporate leadership, and the franchise owner in question, Alex unravels the pretzel puzzle, revealing insights into impulse retail, urban foot traffic, and the American franchise dream.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting the Scene: The Subway Pretzel Mystery

• Listener "Jed" describes the busy, humid Atlantic Avenue–Barclays Center station, which connects multiple subway lines, the Long Island Railroad terminal, and a mall above.
  (02:42) Jed: "It is really humid in there. It's very busy. And it's also probably one of the densest parts of Brooklyn..."
• The Oddity:
  Three Wetzel’s Pretzels are located so close together that you “could get to all of them within a minute.”
  (05:22) Jed: “You could get to all of them within a minute. It's really that quick.”

The Broader Pattern: Pretzel Clusters Across America

• Initial assumption: This is a localized Brooklyn phenomenon—WRONG!
• Other examples: 3 Wetzel’s in American Dream Mall (NJ), 4 at Del Amo Fashion Center (CA), 5 at Crypto.com Arena (LA Lakers)—a pattern of clustering in malls and event venues.
• Central question: Why would any company cluster multiple identical franchises so close together?

Bringing in the Experts: Planet Money’s Take

• Alexi Horowitz Ghazi explains the appeal:
  (09:17) Alexi: "It's like exactly in this delectable sweet spot...something in the world that is all around us...Starbucks, McDonald's...it sort of feels like you're watching the ebb and flow of some sort of titanic corporate competitive battle...how it could possibly make economic sense...?"
• Alexi offers to investigate and connects with Wetzel’s corporate leadership.

Wetzel’s Corporate Strategy Explained

• John Fisher (Head of Development, Wetzel’s):
  • Core Mantra: “Pretzels to the people.”
    • (10:47) “When people say, what's your job? My job is to bring pretzels to the people. I even have a wristband on. This is pretzels to the people. It's like kind of our mantra.”
  • Impulse Product:
    Wetzel’s considers pretzels an “impulse product,” not a destination purchase (unlike pizza or coffee).
    • (12:11) "People don't get in their car and say, I'm going to go get a pretzel..."
  • Placement Strategy:
    Put storefronts in as many high-traffic, high-visibility locations as possible—sometimes within the same building or even on the same floor—because exposure, smell, and convenience drive sales.
    • (13:03) “The business model is impulse driven....I’m even like exposing them to the thought and the smell at one place where then they see it a second time and they're like, ah, I can't resist. Yes, I escaped once, but not the second time. I need one now.”

Addressing Cannibalization: Profitability of Clustered Stores

• Concern Raised: Aren’t these locations cannibalizing each other’s sales?
• Fisher’s Response:
  There’s minor cannibalization, but far less than expected; the incremental sales from additional “impulse” locations more than make up for it if the traffic is honestly there.
  • (14:01) “Is there cannibalization when you open a second store? A little bit, but not very much. It's pretty amazing.”
• Only One Franchisee: Company policy means all same-roof clusters are run by the same franchise owner—no intra-brand competition.

Franchise Defense: Pre-empting Competitors & Controlled Expansion

• Sometimes extra Wetzel’s are installed just to keep spaces from going to competitors.
• Wetzel’s HQ must approve every location; successful clusters tend to be in malls, transit hubs, stadiums.

Proving the Model: Data from the Field

• Producer Amore Yates observes all three Barclays Wetzel’s; at various times, there are lines and steady customer flow at each.
  (See "Field Observations" below.)

On-the-Ground Economics: Franchise Owner Ricky Alam’s Story

Meeting Ricky Alam (Franchisee, 20+ Years Experience)

• Background: Immigrated from Bangladesh, started with a failed liquor store, then a mall kiosk selling painted hermit crabs, then moved into Wetzel’s franchises.
• Growth Model: Opened first Wetzel’s in 2004; within a year and a half added another AT THE SAME MALL. Initial drop in first store’s sales (10–15%) rebounded quickly.
  • (26:07) “Within a year and a half, I opened the second location...that took a hit...but within six months it came back.”
• Empire Status: 17 locations owned, east and west coast.

How Ricky Decides Where to Open

• Method: Old-school people-counting—stands there with a clicker or app, tallying foot traffic. Needs to see 1,500–1,700 people per hour to justify a new spot.
  • (28:39) “You got to have 15 to 1700 people every given hour.”
• Barclays Case Study:
  • Opened main mall location in 2016—perfect spot until pandemic.
  • Covid Impact: Business dropped 40–50%. Stayed open due to lease obligations.
  • Recovery: Landlord offered two tiny locations within the subway terminal (all or nothing deal). These satellite shops only sell (not bake), with product supplied from mall kitchen upstairs (low labor, low overhead).
  • Outcome: The two subway outposts not only survived but subsidized the main location’s recovery; each has distinct traffic due to physical platform separation.
    • (32:53) Ricky: “Answer to this is the both location has its own customer. Yes, there are some spillover from the first floor to the second floor, but each location has its own customer.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “You could get to all of them within a minute.”
  —Jed, marveling at the closeness (05:22)
• “Pretzels to the people.”
  —John Fisher, Wetzel’s corporate mantra (10:47)
• “Yes, I escaped once, but not the second time. I need one now.”
  —John Fisher, on impulse buying (13:15)
• “Pretzel logic”—and the ‘delicious olfactory attrition’
  —Alexi Horowitz Ghazi, summing up the corporate strategy (13:24)
• “It’s all I’m doing right here. I’m bringing the pretzels to the people. That’s all.”
  —Ricky Alam, on his franchise ethos (33:26)
• "This is amazing. I'm a gog."
  —Jed, astonished at the results (35:18–35:20)

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Important Timestamps

• 02:42–06:25 — Listener Jed describes the Atlanta Barclays cluster, his confusion, and curiosity
• 07:33–10:33 — Planet Money’s Alexi Horowitz Ghazi joins, relating the phenomenon to broader business economics and similar clustering in other franchises
• 10:47–17:07 — John Fisher (Wetzel’s) explains the company’s human-centric “impulse” location strategy, the importance of traffic, and what makes Wetzel’s different from destination brands
• 23:09–28:51 — Alexi meets franchise owner Ricky Alam, who discusses real-world franchise economics, location strategy, and resilience during the pandemic
• 29:58–33:26 — Ricky details how the cluster model at Barclays works, combining shared kitchen logistics, platform separation, and differentiated commuter flows
• 34:15–35:18 — Field reporting (by Amore Yates): at each Wetzel’s, customers are stopping by, confirming the business model in practice
• 35:18–35:49 — Jed, amazed to have his “tiny” question turn into a robust investigation (and a few laughs about making something great out of “nothing”)

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Field Observations

• Amore Yates’ (producer) on-the-ground findings:
  • Even when lines were short and turnover was rapid, each location caught its own batch of commuters—validating the model that separate storefronts actually serve different micro-markets within the same building.
  • Each Wetzel’s—though apparently redundant—has its moment as the most convenient (or most tempting) option for different flows of people.

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Core Takeaways

• Wetzel’s clusters locations because pretzels are an “impulse product;” more points of sale mean more opportunities for last-second purchase.
• Minimal cannibalization occurs if foot traffic is high—most franchisees find that extra satellite stands quickly become profitable.
• All clustered locations under one roof are owned by a single franchisee, so even if customers are siphoned from one to another, it’s the same owner (and P&L statement!)
• Franchisees (like Ricky) rely on old-fashioned people counting, and must constantly adapt as traffic patterns change (COVID hits, events move, etc).
• Seemingly trivial urban details often reveal complex urban logic, business models, and human behavior—sometimes, the city’s “weird” is actually “working.”

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Final Words

• Jed’s Reflection:
  (35:18) “This is amazing... The fact that you guys can make a story out of this, that there’s something to find? I was fully expecting you guys to just say, all right, there’s nothing here...”
• The Hyperfixed team transforms a mundane irritation into a revealing case study of urban economics and the American franchise hustle—one pretzel at a time.

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Transcript

[Alex Goldman]

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[Jed]

And then when I started asking that question, it was impossible to unring that bell.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

People were asking chatbots to tell them if God exists.

[Alex Goldman]

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[Jed]

It is really humid in there. It's very busy. And it's also probably one of the densest parts of Brooklyn. Like, that's probably as dense as it gets.

[Alex Goldman]

This is Jed. He was born and raised on the Upper west side of New York, but he has lived in Brooklyn for the last five years. And what he's describing right now is the epicenter of this week's question. His neighborhood subway stop, the Atlantic Avenue Barclays center station.

[Jed]

To call it just a subway station, it's underplaying it a little bit because 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.

[Alex Goldman]

The Atlantic Avenue Barclays center station is not just a beast of a name, it's also a beast of a place. It's consistently ranked as the number one busiest subway station in Brooklyn. And the reason it's so busy is because this one hub connects downtown Brooklyn with the rest of New York City and the rest of New York City to the Barclays center, which is like the Brooklyn equivalent of Madison Square Garden. The Brooklyn Nets play there. Bad Bunnies played there. As far as event spaces go, it's really a world class venue. But the subway station you take to get there, not so much. Like Jed said, it's humid, it's busy. And the funny thing is, that's not even Jed's biggest problem with the station.

[Jed]

On the upper end in the mall, there is one Wetzel Spratzels. And it looks like any Wetzel's Pretzels. And then within the system, on the top floor, there's a Wetzel's Pretzels. And on the bottom floor there is another Wetzel Spritzels. 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.

[Alex Goldman]

Sometimes we get a question that's immediately interesting. We can see that there's a knot to untangle. And even if we can't untangle it, we know the journey of trying will be a story in itself. But Jed's question was not one of those questions. It seemed so simple and so stakesless. I can't even tell you what compelled us to respond. Even Jed was a little embarrassed about this question. But the more he told us about this, the more interesting it became. It wasn't just about the fact that there were three of these soft pretzel franchises in the same subway complex. It was that they were comically close to one another. If you were to walk a circuit between all of them, how far away are they from one another?

[Jed]

You could get to all of them within a minute. It's really that quick.

[Conspirituality Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Jed]

I don't know if we can pull up like a floor plan of Atlantic Terminal or something, but literally you're walking on the top floor of like where the subways are and you see the Wetzels Pretzels on your right hand side. You go down the stairs and there's the other Wetzel's Pretzels. They're that close. And then the walkway to the next one not very far off.

[Alex Goldman]

When did you notice that there were three Wetzel's Pretzels locations?

[Jed]

By the time I moved into Brooklyn. Like 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 think the one on the lower floor had moved in first. And I'm like, oh, that's strange. I didn't even know that there was enough space to put anything there. And then the one on the floor above moved in as well. And like, what, what are we doing? This is excessive.

[Alex Goldman]

That is so weird. I mean, I'm definitely curious about this, but, like, what would a solution look like to you?

[Jed]

I don't know what a solve is that? Clearly I. I needed to air my grievances more than anything, which is why I wasn't expecting like a solid, oh, like, we made the perfect cake, or like, how did this fucking cat medicine thing happened? Those are both great episodes, by the way. But, yeah, I don't know. I don't know how this can turn into a 40 minute anything.

[Alex Goldman]

Listen, we've done much more with much less. 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 Avenue Barclays Terminal. 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 while Jed wasn't sure there was actually any meat on the bones of these questions, something told us there had to be. And we weren't the only ones who thought so.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yeah, no, Jed's question is actually Fascinating. It's like a window into the whole landscape around us.

[Alex Goldman]

This is Alexi Horowitz Ghazi. He is one of the hosts and reporters of NPR's business and economics podcast, Planet Money. And the reason we reached out to him is because shortly after our conversation with Jed, we discovered that this thing that was happening at the Atlantic Barclays Station was not at all unique to the Atlantic Barclays Station. Turns out There are also three Wetzel's pretzels. the American Dream Mall in New Jersey. At the Del Amo Fashion center in Torrance, California, there are four Wetzels pretzels. And at the crypto.com arena where the LA Lakers play, there are five Wetzels pretzels locations. And these are not the only places where clusters of Wetzels appear in America. In fact, the more we looked into it, the more we noticed where one Wetzel's Pretzels location exists, other Wetzel's Pretzels are often very close by. Now, clearly there was some corporate strategy fueling these clusters of Wetzels. But for the life of me, I couldn't understand what it was. Having so many storefronts so close together just seemed to violate the most basic laws of supply and demand. So we reached out to the Planet Money team, hoping they could shed some light on what we might be missing here. But folks, they didn't know either. This whole clustering thing seemed just as counterintuitive to them as it did to us. And for a reporter like Alexi, who spent years investigating questions about consumer behavior and the corporate systems that feed it, that not knowing was actually very exciting. So he told us he wanted a piece of the action.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Sign me up. Let's go.

[Alex Goldman]

What is it about Jed's question that is so interesting to you?

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

I think Jed's question is a question that I have had personally and that I think a lot of us have. It's like exactly in this delectable sweet spot, or savory, I guess, in this case of like something in the world that is all around us all the time. Like all of a sudden you'll be surrounded by like three Starbucks on a given street or McDonald's or whatever else. And it sort of feels like you're watching the ebb and flow of some sort of titanic corporate competitive battle that's happening, but you don't really understand why or who's competing with who or how it could possibly make economic sense for any of the actors involved to so over saturate us with the same franchise in such A small space. And so it just felt like one of those things that is like a tiny question. And it's kind of funny because it's so small, but it actually touches on, like, the fabric of cities and just the things we walk around and are surrounded by every day. So I am eager to get out there and hit the streets and figure out what's going on.

[Alex Goldman]

Go for it. I'd love to hear the answer. And not having to go out and do it myself makes it even more enticing to me.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yes. Let me do this one. Let me ride. I'll send you in a more Whatever I find. Stay tuned.

[Alex Goldman]

Just like that, he was off to the races. And a few short weeks later, we got an email from Alexei saying that he'd connected with Wetzel's corporate and that he'd already learned a ton about their real estate strategy from the very guy who leads it.

[John Fisher]

When people say, what's your job? My job is to bring pretzels to the people. I even have a wristband on. This is pretzels to the people. It's like kind of our mantra. Like, wherever there's people, there should be pretzels.

[Alex Goldman]

This is John Fisher. He's head of development for Wetzel's Pretzels, which means his job is to help the company's franchisees find and build successful locations. And this thing he just said about bringing pretzels to the people, it is more than just a mantra. It is the key to Wetzel's business strategy and the answer to Jed's questions. 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 wasn't so sure about that. And of course, he can't actually speak to the real estate strategies of those other companies because he obviously doesn't work for those other companies. But what he can say with 100% certainty is that the real estate needs of Wetzel's Pretzels are very different from the needs of those other companies. And the thing that makes them so different is that unlike coffee and burgers, pretzels just aren't the kind of product people go out of their way to buy.

[John Fisher]

People don't get in their car and say, I'm going to go get a pretzel and I'm going to drive to the mall, walk 15 minutes in the Parking lot, go in through, try to park in and get a pretzel and then come out, right? They're going to go to the mall and happen to get a pretzel while they're there.

[Alex Goldman]

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 Wetzels, 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.

[John Fisher]

The business model is impulse driven. And so, you know, I'm capturing people at different places in different times within their route, or I'm even like exposing them to the thought and the smell at one place where then they see it a second time and they're like, ah, I can't resist. Yes, I escaped once for not the second time. I need one now.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

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

[Alex Goldman]

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?

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

How do you think about when it makes sense to have multiple Wetzels locations in the same broad space versus the risk of cannibalizing your own sales or oversaturating the place?

[John Fisher]

Yeah, it's really unique. I used to work for a pizza company and it was a take and bake pizza company. You didn't go there unless you planned on buying a pizza. It was an ultimate destination purchase, right? You don't just happen to walk around and buy a raw pizza and you know, you kind of know that you're going to go there, right? So what's interesting is you have the ultimate destination type of concepts where you build a store and if you put a store five miles away, franchisee is really mad because, hey, I have customers coming from over there and you know, I'm going to lose 10, 20% of my sales. Wetzel's is kind of the opposite of that. We literally have malls that have five stores in the same mall because we're an impulse product. For us, it's really just about, is the mall big enough, or is there enough traffic in different occasions to support different impulse purchases in that mall? And is there cannibalization when you open a second store? A little bit, but not very much. It's pretty amazing. I think I was surprised when I got here. I was like, really? You can have two stores in the same mall? I've never seen that before. And now I'm sitting here putting 3 and 4 in some malls because it's really about that impulse nature. So, you know, people go away. How can you have so many stores in the same area? Well, you have to be an impulse brand. You have to be a brand where people are making the decision right as they're walking in front of you to have your product or not. They're not going there specifically for you. So, you know, whether it's a subway or a theme park or a stadium, you're going to have different locations based on where the people are to service them. And so not a lot of businesses can do that.

[Alex Goldman]

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, not all of these clusters were designed to run this particular gambit. 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. 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.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

So in this case, it's like, okay, these locations may seem to a layman, like me walking through being like, how? Why would you possibly have these two pretzel stands so close to each other? Well, the proof is sort of in the profits.

[John Fisher]

I think you have to look at every concept and what works for that concept, where they are on that. I'll call it the destination impulse spectrum.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Yes.

[John Fisher]

And if you're on the very high side of the impulse spectrum, you probably can get away with having several locations very close to each other to capture the traffic. And if you're on the other side of that spectrum, you probably don't want to think about doing that. It'd probably be a lot of cannibalization and not really work.

[Alex Goldman]

Yeah, 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.

[Conspirituality Podcast Host]

Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex trafficked children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals.

[Jed]

But it's all okay.

[Conspirituality Podcast Host]

The Great Awakening is coming. What is happening? Every week on Conspirituality Podcast we explore the first fever dreams that suck Friends, family and wellness gurus down the right wing cult spiral in a search for salvation.

[Alex Goldman]

This episode of Hyper Fixed is brought to you by Drip Drop. Look, I'll admit it. I'm not great about drinking water. Sue me. No, seriously, hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit against me because I know that when I'm feeling off, it's often hydration related. And that's what Drip Drops for. Drip Drop is doctor Developed proven fast hydration that helps your body and mind work better. Which is exactly what 2026 U needs. Think support for busy days, long workouts or everything in between. Drip Drop uses science based formulas for rapid hydration so you feel results fast while getting three times the electrolytes of leading sports drinks. And honestly, their products taste great. There are 16 original flavors and eight zero sugar plus options that fit seamlessly into my routine, morning pre workout, post workout or midday slump. And it's not just for workouts because it's engineered to hydrate you faster and more effectively than water alone. So I've been putting some in my water every morning before I go to work. And by go to work I of course mean go into my basement. And since I'm actually drinking water now, I I take back my invitation for you to sue me. So please don't do that. I probably couldn't afford it and I'm actually drinking water right now. Drip Drop is offering podcast listeners 20% off your first order. Go to drip drop.com and use promo code hyperfixed that's dripdrop.com promo code hyperfixed for 20% off. Stock up [e-mail] and use promo code hyperfixed.

[Ricky Alam]

Foreign.

[Alex Goldman]

This episode of Hyper Fixed is brought to you by Momentous Fiber plus. All right, look, I find exercising in public really embarrassing because who wants people to see them, like, struggling and grunting and sweating? It is very weird. But this year I am giving it a shot. And an interesting thing that I learned recently is that even though I thought fiber was just about like, you know, staying regular, fiber actually plays a major role in energy, stability, recovery, focus, and overall performance. Which is like a double whammy for me because for reasons that I will happily spare you in this advertisement, I don't think my gut health is fantastic. That's why I partnered with Momentous. They've built a reputation as a high trust brand in a low trust category by holding themselves to a higher bar. What they call the momentous standard. Their commitment to doing things the right way, not the easy way. Every product is tested for contaminants, heavy metals, banned substances, and verified for label accuracy. So you always know exactly what you're putting in your body. And if a product doesn't meet their standard, it never hits the shelves, which is way more transparent than I would personally be. I'm not letting you test me for anything. Right now, Momentous is offering our listeners up to 35% off your first order, which with promo code HyperFixed, head to livemomentous.com and use the promo code HYPERFIXED for up to 35% off your first order. That's livemomentous.com promo code HYPER Fixed. Welcome back to the show. So before the break, we met a guy named Jed who'd recently made a perplexing observation at his local subway stop, the Atlantic Avenue Barclays center station. There were three Wetzel's pretzels so close together that it seemed illogical. And he wanted to know why. Why so many? Why so close together? How could this possibly make financial sense? So we passed Jed's question onto one of our business minded buddies, Alexi Horowitz Ghazi from NPR's Planet Money. And he returned to us with an answer. Wetzels knows that they're selling a product that people aren't going out of their way to buy. So they strategically cluster their stores to make sure their product is in people's way as frequently as possible. And that's more or less all there is to it, at least in theory. See, we still wanted to know if this strategy was actually Working in practice, specifically at the site that, that launched this investigation to begin with, the Atlantic Avenue Barclays center station. So Alexei reached out to the guy who owns all three of those Wetzels. His name is Ricky Alam. He is a very seasoned Wetzel's Pretzels franchisee and he's based in Southern California, which also happens to be where Alexi's based. So Ricky invited Alexi to meet up in person at the site of Ricky's first Wetzel's Pretzels location in the Westfield Fashion Square mall in Sherman Oaks, California.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Okay, testing, testing. It's Alexi. It is Thursday, March 19th at 3:10 Pacific Time. I've just gotten to the. I think it's the Westfield Mall in Sherman Oaks, California, and I am on a, a sort of pretzel mission. I've talked to John Fisher up at Wetzel's Pretzels. Eight each queue he walked me through kind of the basics of how companies think about when it makes economic sense to have a couple franchise locations near each other, that it really comes down to kind of what type of restaurant it is and what the flow of customer traffic is. But we've come here to get it straight from the franchisee's mouth. Okay, here it goes. Nothing. I've just parked and lets go find Ricky.

[Alex Goldman]

Now this is a little off story, but it made me laugh so much that I wanted to share. The first time I chatted with Alexei, he confessed that when it comes to shopping malls, he's a bit of a neophyte. He said there wasn't a major mall culture in the city he grew up in, so he wasn't super familiar with things like Wetzels and Cinnabon. And although he told me his local mall did have a Sbarro, he pronounced it Shbarro, which honestly told me more about his relationship to Malz than anything he could have said. And that's why I wasn't surprised to learn that just minutes after Alexei walked into the mall with recording gear strapped to his body and a microphone positioned proudly in his hand, Alexei was intercepted by mall security and questioned about what exactly he was doing there. Thankfully, it didn't last long, because after Alexei explained what he was doing, he tried interviewing the guard about their thoughts on this pretzel cluster question. And I think the guard was just so profoundly disinterested in this project, they ended up letting him go. So Alexei continued on his way and before long, he spotted Ricky.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

I see Ricky in the distance. There we go.

[Ricky Alam]

How you doing?

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Good, how are you, Ricky? I presume.

[Ricky Alam]

Good to see you.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Good to see you too. What a pleasure.

[Ricky Alam]

No problem. Same here.

[Alex Goldman]

This is Ricky Alam. He's been a Wetzels 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 LA 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. Then he started a business that sold painted hermit crabs from kiosks at the mall. And that one worked out pretty well. But he wanted something that felt more permanent. And that's when he started looking at franchises. Pretzels aren't like a big thing in Bangladesh. But his years in the United States taught Ricky that Americans love hot dough. So he opened this wetzels in 2004, and within a year and a half, he opened a second location right here in the same mall.

[Ricky Alam]

Within a year and a half, I opened the second location and the first floor. And that took a hit on this one little bit. 10, 15% business dropped from the first location. But within six months it came back. Whatever the business I was doing on the first location, it came back. Second location is doing its own business. And I think within another few years, I was able to open another location and in a few years, another location. So, yeah, I mean, goal was to open at least one location every other year or whatnot.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

How many of you opened in total?

[Ricky Alam]

17 locations combined, east and west.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

So. 17 locations. I mean, that sounds like a little pretzel empire.

[Ricky Alam]

So far, so good.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And when did you get a sense that getting into the dough business might eventually translate into roll in the dough?

[Ricky Alam]

You know, not every dough business is gonna make you the dough. Remember, there is always risk, even the proven business. You gotta make sure the location is right.

[Alex Goldman]

But how do you make sure that a location is right? How do you decide if a mall can support a second storefront or if a subway mall can support 3?

[Ricky Alam]

We are driven by where people at. Let's put it this way. So we do sit down and count, literally hand count, how many people passing by in front of this potential location? So there is a certain amount of traffic has to pass by, and then we open. So to take in that consideration to open a second location is that we do the same thing going to the second location, if it's within the same mall or same train station or even the airport or what have you. We do the Same counting. How many people passing by. Are these the same traffic? Second floor versus first floor. We take all those under consideration before you open the second location.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

How do you count? Do you have like an app or. A little.

[Ricky Alam]

Well, back in the days, even still, as of right now, I have one of those. Clicker. Yeah, but now you have an app. You have all the sophisticated software and whatnot. Yes, Wet souls do their due diligence, but at the same time, I like to come in and sit down just like this, and I want to see how many people passing by. And I count. Literally, with the phone. I put a timer and I count.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And is there a number that you want to see or some sort of mark you're trying to get to?

[Ricky Alam]

You got to have 15 to 1700 people every given hour.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

Okay, 15 to 1700 an hour.

[Ricky Alam]

Yeah.

[Alex Goldman]

But Ricky stressed that this is not a perfect science. Sometimes, he says, the foot traffic just doesn't convert to sales in the way you thought it would. And sometimes the foot traffic you thought you could count on just suddenly dries up. Which brings us to the question at hand about whether or not the cluster of Wetzel's Pretzels at the Atlantic Barclays station is actually profitable. So when Ricky opened his first Atlantic storefront in 2016, seemed like a perfect location. As you've already heard, Wetzel's Pretzels does best in places like malls and transit hubs and event centers. And this first location seemed to offer a bit of all of those things. The spot was in a mall above a subway station across the street from an event center. 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 Wetzels was forced to shut down. The thing is that when the store reopened six months later, the pre pandemic business just didn't come back.

[Ricky Alam]

My business dropped. Compared to 2018 and 19, it dropped 40. Almost 50%. 40 of them. 50%. So I was in a situation that I thought about shutting it down, but I couldn't do it because I have the obligation. I signed the long term contract.

[Alex Goldman]

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 100ft 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.

[Ricky Alam]

Those two satellite locations actually helped me to stay in the business within this mall. Because upstairs, main location, I'm still suffering.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

So the idea to expand to the other locations was kind of to offset the losses that were happening in the main one in a way.

[Ricky Alam]

Not exactly. To be honest with you, it did help me, but it's not, it was not in my thought that is gonna upset my loss from upstairs. My thought was, upstairs, that's where I bake my goods. Since I bake it. Those two locations, I don't. I don't bake anything. I don't make anything. I take the food from upstairs and I just sell it over there. So since I have. It's like a commissary, let's put it this way, since I have this facility, let's open those two locations. There will be less labor. It's going to. Because I run those two with one person each location. Everything else comes from upstairs. A2Z pretzel, the lemonade, and you name it, the frozen drink and the soda, everything comes from upstairs.

[Alex Goldman]

What Ricky's saying is that unlike 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.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

So maybe just to boil down the question, I think the listener's question was, you know, passing through the Atlantic terminal was how could it possibly be like, make economic sense to have the same business so close to each other in the same space? What's the kind of like boiled down answer to that question?

[Ricky Alam]

Answer to this is the both location has its own customer. Yes, there are some spillover from the first floor to the second floor, but each location has its own customer.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

And especially for a product that you're kind of like catching them in a moment or they're smelling something and just Deciding to stop and that sort of thing. Is that important?

[Ricky Alam]

Absolutely. It's that product, the smell, the sampling. This is very. There's no escaping. Let's put it this way.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

I like it. It feels like we're getting to the bottom of the pretzel logic.

[Ricky Alam]

Yes, yes. Look, it's all I'm doing right here. I'm bringing the pretzels to the people. That's all.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

I've heard that before.

[Ricky Alam]

There you go.

[Alex Goldman]

Alexi asked John Fisher to check the sales figures for all three Atlantic Avenue Barclays Wetzels, and he confirmed that pretzels were being sold at all three locations. But because he couldn't give us access to their books, we decided to do a little data collecting of our own. On a random day in the middle of the week, we sent Hyper Fix producer Amore Yates to the Atlantic Avenue Barclays subway station and asked her to spend some time simply watching the Wetzels. Amor lives in Brooklyn, and she's been through this station more times than she can count. But this was the first time she'd actually just stood there. And while she was standing, she saw something that she had never seen before, something Jed had also missed on his many trips through the subway station. There was a line at different moments at each of these Wetzel's locations, people were stopping to buy pretzels. It was easy to miss them because the transactions were happening so quickly. The lines never got super long. But sure enough, when a subway car would pull in and a wave of people would go by on their way from one place to another, two or three of them would stop. And whether it was because they caught the aroma of warm dough or simply because they were feeling a bit peckish and there were no other grab and go options around at that moment, they decided to buy a pretzel. And presumably over the course of the day, this was happening enough to keep these businesses in business, which keeps guys like Ricky reinvesting in this model. So as strange as it seems to have so many Wetzels clustered so closely together, from a business perspective, the recipe works.

[Jed]

This is amazing.

[John Fisher]

I'm.

[Jed]

I'm a Gog.

[Alex Goldman]

Here's Jet again. I've never heard anybody say a gog on this show before. Congratulations.

[Jed]

First time for everything, I guess.

[Alex Goldman]

What is it that amazes you about this?

[Jed]

The fact that you guys can make a story out of this, that. That there's something to find? I was fully expecting you guys to just say, all right, there's nothing here. Thank you so much. It's like we had fun, but we

[Alex Goldman]

got to leave it right here. Thank you for submitting this question, Jen. It was a lot of fun.

[Jed]

Thank you, Amor. Alex oh my God. This is okay. Just as one more thing. I feel like I was given a genie and granted one wish and I like, I felt like I wasted my wish and that is absolutely not the case.

[John Fisher]

Not at all.

[Alexi Horowitz Ghazi]

No.

[Alex Goldman]

This was great. Hyperfixed is produced and edited edited by Emma Cortland, Amor Yates, Sari Safra Sukhenik and Tori Dominguez Peak this week's reporting efforts were spearheaded by Alexi Horowitz Ghazi. The music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and me it was engineered by Tony Williams. Fact checking by Naomi Barr. You can get bonus episodes join our Discord, get discounts on merch and a whole lot [e-mail] join Hyper Fixed is a proud member of the Radiotopia from prx, a network of independent, creator owned listener supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at Radiotopia fm. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you on the next one. Radiotopia

[Ricky Alam]

from prx.