Rich foods

Summary

Marketplace Podcast Summary: "Rich Foods" | December 11, 2024

The December 11, 2024 episode of "Marketplace," hosted by Kai Ryssdal, delves into critical economic issues affecting Americans, ranging from inflation trends and rising food prices to the evolving landscape of autonomous transportation and the escalating costs of childcare. Through expert interviews and personal narratives, the episode provides a comprehensive analysis of the current economic climate and its tangible effects on everyday life.

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I. Inflation Trends and Analysis

Understanding the Latest CPI Figures

The episode begins with a discussion on the recent Consumer Price Index (CPI) data, highlighting a 0.3% increase in inflation for November, marking the largest monthly rise since spring. Year-over-year inflation has climbed for three consecutive months, reaching 2.7% (01:20).

Expert Insights on Inflation Stability

Omer Sharif, President of Inflation Insights, suggests that certain volatile data points, such as hotel and car rental rates, may have skewed the final inflation number. He posits that excluding these extremes, the actual inflation rate is closer to 2.10% (02:28). Similarly, Eric Winograd, Chief Economist at Alliance Bernstein, notes a significant moderation in shelter inflation, with rent prices up 3.10% month-over-month—lower than previous months but still a concern (02:50).

Jeffrey Roach, Chief Economist at LPL Financial, offers a perspective excluding housing costs, indicating a more manageable 1.6% rise in consumer prices year-over-year. This nuanced view suggests that while inflation is slowing, it remains a persistent issue that requires ongoing attention (03:04).

Implications for Consumers

Kai Ryssdal emphasizes that despite headline numbers suggesting a slowdown, everyday experiences like grocery shopping still reflect the ongoing pressure of inflation. Food prices at home rose by 0.5% in November, impacting household budgets (04:00).

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II. Rising Food Prices and Consumer Impact

Food Price Inflation: A "Cold Comfort"

Ricky Volpe, an agribusiness professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, forecasts that 2024 will see significantly below-average food price inflation, approximately 1.2-1.3% above 2023 levels—about half the historical norm (04:36). However, he acknowledges that higher food prices still strain consumer finances.

Factors Driving Higher Food Costs

Several factors contribute to food price inflation:

• Climate Change and Droughts: These environmental challenges reduce crop yields, increasing the cost of staples.
• Avian Flu Impact: Nada Sanders from Northeastern University points out that avian flu outbreaks have disrupted poultry production, raising prices for chicken and eggs.
• Beef Prices: Beef costs surged by over 3% last month, further escalating overall food expenses.

Consumer Behavior Adjustments

Tom Bailey, Senior Analyst for Consumer Foods at Rabobank, observes a 6% decline in restaurant transactions during the third quarter, indicating reduced consumer spending on dining out. Jonathan Poirot, a professor and chef at Johnson and Wales University, notes that both consumers and chefs are adapting by incorporating less meat into their diets, driven by rising prices (05:53).

Personal Impact

Kimberly Adams reports on how these rising food costs are altering dinner tables across America, with individuals and families making significant adjustments to their eating habits to cope with the financial strain (06:46).

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III. Autonomous Vehicles and the Future of Transportation

Waymo’s Autonomous Ride-Hailing in Los Angeles

The episode features an in-depth look at Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous ride-hailing subsidiary. John Gravois and his team from Wired spent a day following a Waymo vehicle in Los Angeles to explore the future of automotive transportation (07:20).

Field Report: Tailing a Self-Driving Car

Stacey Vanek Smith and Kai Ryssdal describe their experience chasing a Waymo vehicle:

• Methodology: They hired an Uber driver to operate a chase car and used the Waymo app to hail and follow the autonomous vehicle.
• Public Reactions: Passengers reported a smooth and consistent ride experience, highlighting the reduced abrupt movements compared to human drivers. Gabe, the Uber driver involved in the chase, shares his perspective on how Waymo’s driving style mirrors trained human taxi drivers, balancing aggression and caution (08:50 - 10:25).

Economic Viability and Ridership Growth

The discussion addresses the economic challenges Waymo faces, notably the current low profitability per vehicle despite receiving substantial funding. Stacey Vanek Smith notes that ridership is rapidly increasing, with monthly rides growing from 100,000 to 150,000, suggesting improving unit economics (10:47 - 11:23).

User Experience

Vanek Smith shares personal anecdotes from riding in Waymo vehicles, emphasizing the initial apprehension that quickly dissipates, leading to a comfortable and normalized experience for passengers (11:28 - 11:50).

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IV. The Rising Cost of Childcare and Its Impact on Families

Personal Stories Highlighting Childcare Challenges

Amber Lord’s story illustrates the severe financial and emotional toll of rising childcare costs. In Virginia Beach, the cost of daycare surged to $25,000 annually for four days a week, forcing her to leave a beloved marketing career to stay home with her child (13:09 - 19:31). Her experience underscores a broader crisis where increasing childcare expenses are pushing many women out of the workforce.

Economic Analysis and Policy Insights

Lauren Bauer from the Brookings Institution explains that society has historically allocated significant resources towards college savings but has neglected the immediate financial demands of childcare. This imbalance exacerbates the difficulty for parents, particularly mothers, to remain economically active (16:15).

Global Perspectives on Childcare and Labor Force Participation

Claudia Goldin, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, emphasizes that lowering childcare costs is crucial for supporting female labor force participation. Countries like Sweden, Canada, France, and Germany, which offer highly subsidized childcare, have seen higher rates of women in the workforce compared to the United States (18:45).

Resilience and Adaptation

Despite the challenges, Amber Lord successfully transitioned to a consulting business, leveraging her marketing and social media skills to replace her previous income. While she cherishes time with her son, she acknowledges the need for affordable childcare to achieve a better work-life balance (19:31).

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V. Career Transitions: Embracing Retirement and New Opportunities

Dr. Michelle McKinney Jones’ Career Shift

The episode features Dr. Michelle McKinney Jones, who retired from a 31-year corporate career at age 55 to become a faculty fellow in management at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her transition underscores the possibilities and rewards of pursuing new professional paths later in life (22:29 - 25:23).

Personal Fulfillment and Professional Growth

Dr. Jones shares how her corporate experience enriches her role in academia, allowing her to mentor students effectively. She expresses immense satisfaction in her new career, highlighting the joy derived from teaching and witnessing students' intellectual breakthroughs. Her story serves as an inspirational example for listeners considering significant career changes (23:01 - 25:23).

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VI. Additional Economic Insights

Supply Chain Challenges and Future Predictions

Looking ahead, the episode discusses potential disruptions in the supply chain:

• Labor Agreements: A temporary agreement between dock workers and port operators on the East Coast is set to expire on January 15, potentially leading to labor disputes.
• Tariff Implications: With President-elect Donald Trump poised to take office on January 20, expectations of broad-based tariffs could further complicate import dynamics.

Jason Miller from Michigan State University and Ian Britton from CBRE highlight how increased imports are straining railroads in the West, despite ample warehousing capacity. These developments suggest that the logistics and transportation sectors may face heightened costs and operational challenges in the near future (19:31 - 22:29).

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VII. Closing Remarks

The episode concludes with a brief update on the NFL’s Buffalo Bills and Miami Dolphins selling minority ownership stakes to private equity groups under specific conditions, reflecting ongoing trends in sports management and investment (25:23 - 26:35).

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Overall, "Rich Foods" offers a multifaceted examination of the current economic landscape, emphasizing how macroeconomic trends like inflation ripple through various aspects of daily life, from food prices and childcare to innovative transportation solutions and career transitions. Through expert analysis and personal stories, the episode provides listeners with a deeper understanding of the challenges and adaptations shaping the American economy today.

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Notable Quotes:

• Omer Sharif (02:28): "If you kind of tune these extremes out, price inflation in November wasn't 3.10%. It was closer to 2.10%. So that's much more encouraging."

• Amber Lord (16:45): "There is no village. Like I live in a country where they don't, they don't care."

• Claudia Goldin (18:45): "Every country that has highly subsidized childcare has pretty high levels of female labor force participation."

• Dr. Michelle McKinney Jones (24:30): "If you love what you do, you will never work a day in your life."

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Timestamps Reference:

• Inflation Discussion: 00:34 - 03:35
• Food Prices Impact: 04:36 - 06:46
• Autonomous Vehicles: 07:20 - 11:50
• Childcare Costs: 13:09 - 19:31
• Career Transition: 22:29 - 25:23
• Additional Insights: 19:31 - 22:29

Transcript

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

This Marketplace podcast is supported by Glassdoor, announcing the best places to work in 2025, as determined by anonymous reviews from the people who Know Best real employees. Did your company make the list this year? Learn who's leading the way in workplace culture and employee satisfaction and see who's hiring today. Then join the conversation in the Glassdoor community to plot your next career move and make the most of your work Life. [e-mail].

[Kai Rysdal]

Well, let's see. Is inflation bumpy? Is it stuck? There's got to be a word from American Public Media. This is Marketplace in Los Angeles. I'm Kyle Rysdal. It is Wednesday today, December 11th. Good as always to have you along, everybody. Today's macroeconomic word of the day is stall in its verb form, to stop or cause to stop making progress. The subject at hand, of course, is inflation, which rose 0.3% last month. So said this morning's consumer price index.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

3.

[Kai Rysdal]

10% is, as it happens, the biggest bump we've seen since spring. And year over year, inflation is up three months in a row. So how worried ought we be, if at all? Marketplace's Sabri Benishore gets us going.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

Annual inflation back in September was 2.4%. Then in October, the number grew to 2.6%. Then in November, it grew again to 2.7%. So should we not be, I don't know, a little bit freaked out by that? I don't think so. Omer Sharif is president of research firm Inflation Insights. There's a lot of data that went into November's inflation number, and some of it was a little wackadoodle, maybe threw off the final number, a little. Hotel rates today in the data in November went up. On an annualized basis, they went up 45%. That is a wild number. Similarly, on the negative side, if you wanted to rent a car or truck, on an annualized basis, Those prices declined by 31% today. Sharif says if you kind of tune these extremes out, price inflation in November wasn't 3. 10%. It was closer to 2. 10%. So that's much more encouraging. One of the biggest pieces of the inflation pie is the cost of having a roof over your head. And that is starting to look okay. Eric Winograd is chief economist at Alliance Bernstein. What we've seen over the last few months is a significant moderation in shelter inflation. Rent and other shelter prices in November went up 3.10of a percent from the month before, which is higher than you might like to see, but much lower than it has been. And it suggests that things are moving in the right direction. But a lot of people have issues with the rent data. It can lag by a year and.

[Kai Rysdal]

A half, for example.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

So some economists like to take it out of the inflation equation just to see what happens. Jeffrey Roach is one of them. He's chief economist at LPL Financial. So I look at excluding housing, consumer prices are roughly 1.6% up from a year ago. Meaning it's a lot more reasonable and not really worthy of a freakout moment. Not a freak out moment, but also not totally sleeping easy either. It's definitely taking longer than people thought to get inflation down to a healthy level. In New York, I'm Sabree Benishore for Marketplace.

[Kai Rysdal]

I'll take not a freak out moment. Thank you, Wall Street. Today tech was the place to be. We will have the details when we do the numbers. It's both a truism and a principle of this program that economic headlines on say inflation might say things are mostly okay. But if people are not feeling that mostly okay in their everyday, then the headlines just don't matter. Inflation is slowing. Bumpy, but slowing. But when you're grocery shopping, those food prices still sting a little bit. Prices for food at home, economists speak for groceries, were up half a percent month on month in November. Marketplace's Kimberly Adams reports now on what that means for what people are putting on the dinner table.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

It may be cold comfort, but says Ricky Volpe, who teaches agribusiness at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, 2024 is a year of significantly below average food price inflation, where food prices will probably end up about 1.2, 1.3% above where they were in 2023. So actually about half that historical norm. And he gets it. It doesn't feel like things are normal or affordable when you're shopping at the store. People are looking for food prices to come down. And I mean, I should just say that that's probably not going to happen. That's because at least some of the factors contributing to higher food prices are things like climate change, droughts that impact crop yields and meat prices. Beef prices were up more than 3% last month. And when it comes to poultry, says Nada Sanders, who teaches supply chain management at Northeastern University, the avian flu is something that has impacted hens, chickens, and then of course, eggs. And so we've seen those prices beef really volatile. And consumers have been responding to the higher prices, adjusting their diets accordingly and definitely cutting back on going out. Tom Bailey is a senior analyst for Consumer Foods At Rabobank, we are seeing.

[Kai Rysdal]

A lot less demand for going out to restaurants.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

Transactions at restaurants were down 6% in the third quarter of this year, and even chefs are taking notice. Jonathan Poirot is a professor and chef at Johnson and Wales University, teaching students to design meal plans and recipes. He says a lot of those now include less meat, including some of his own cooking. I was making some Mediterranean food the other night and instead of using lamb or beef, I ended up just doing roasted chickpeas as the, the main protein source in the dish. Throw in a little sumac, lemon zest and tahini and he says it was delicious. In Washington, I'm Kimberly Adams for Marketplace.

[Kai Rysdal]

Waymo, the autonomous ride hailing company opened up shop here in LA about a month ago. If you've never seen them, they are quite something. All white electric SUVs, Jaguars as it happens, covered with cameras and sensors pointing every different direction. And a very empty, noticeably so driver's seat. The company, a subsidiary of Alphabet, is betting billions of dollars that they are the future of automotive transportation. John Gravois and a team at Wired spend a day tailing Awaymo car to see what that future might look like. John, thanks for being here.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

Thank you very much.

[Kai Rysdal]

Well, of course, anything is better than sitting around the office or in your living room in front of your computer. Why did you guys decide to do this?

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

Well, San Francisco has a history in car chase cinema and we figured that the best way to make self driving cars strange again for us was to go chase one.

[Kai Rysdal]

So we should say here. It's old hat to you guys in San Francisco, but unless you're in San Francisco, I guess. Where's the other one? Phoenix. And I've seen some here in la. It's a foreign thing for a whole lot of people.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

Exactly. That's what we wanted to. We wanted to re strangify it.

[Kai Rysdal]

All right, so talk methodology here. How'd you go about it?

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

So we hired an Uber driver to drive a chase car with a bunch of us in it and picked a Waymo by summoning it on the Waymo app and then tailed it. And the plan was to have the journalists, some of us, get out of the car and interview writers as they were let out, which, which we did. But it took a little while for the Waymo to pick up anybody.

[Kai Rysdal]

Yeah, I was, I was gonna say, I mean it's, you know, I don't want to spoil it as much. You can spoil a magazine article, but it was a tad anticlimactic.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

Yeah, yeah, it was it was, it was interesting in itself to go from one weird staging lot full of empty self driving cars to another for the first several hours of the day. But that's what we did.

[Kai Rysdal]

What kinds of reactions did you get from people once you tracked them down? What'd they say about their experience in this driverless car?

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

You know, that it was pretty. It was pretty uniform and impressive how much people just love it. They just like the experience of the drive, I guess, is a little bit less herky jerky than with a human driver. But I think a lot of it just comes down to people are just kind of relieved not to have to talk to somebody else, as sad as that is. Especially it was sad for us because we were having a great conversation in our chase car.

[Kai Rysdal]

Tell me about Gabe, your Uber driver, and his thoughts on this whole thing, because that was super interesting.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

Yeah, yeah. So Gabe, this is a guy whose labor is directly at stake. He's the guy whose labor is going to be replaced by a Waymo. He's a guy who's had 30 years of experience as a professional driver, first as a taxi driver. He even organized a taxi driver strike in the days before Uber. And his first. I think his prejudice with Waymo is having shared the road with him sort of sporadically. He thought of them as kind of dopey rule following frustrating vehicles to share the road with. But over the course of the day, he started to recognize that the Waymo was driving a lot like a taxi driver. The Waymo was doing things that were aggressive, that are exactly the kinds of things that a taxi driver is trained to be aggressive with and doing things that were cautious, that are exactly the kinds of things that taxi drivers are trained to be cautious with.

[Kai Rysdal]

Can we talk unit economics here? Just as a matter of. This is of course going to be a business. Waymo is, according to the math from a study you guys cite, they're not making a whole lot of money per vehicle. Right. And eventually they're going to scale and it's going to work out. But for the moment, even though they've gotten 11 billion something dollars, they're not turning a whole lot of profit here.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

Yeah, that's a big question. And the math is even that study is based on a lot of guesswork. It's really hard to say what the unit economics are. What we can say is that the ridership rates are going up so fast that that study is already well out of date. When we were doing our chase, I think the monthly ridership for Waymo was 100,000 rides a month. By October, it was already 150,000 rides a month. So the economics are just shifting under our feet a lot.

[Kai Rysdal]

Yeah. Are you among the Waymo rider faithful? Have you done it? What'd you think?

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

I do not have an account of my own, but I've been on rides with other people and you know, it was that experience. It was. You get, you're a little nervy when you step in and then very quickly it becomes normal.

[Kai Rysdal]

Yeah. Yeah. Jacques Gravois in Wired with a whole team of people following a Waymo around for a day. John, thanks a bunch.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

Thank you. Coming up, while some might think, you know, you should be enjoying retirement, guess what? I am.

[Kai Rysdal]

If you love what you do, you will never work a day in your life. Right. First though, let's do the numbers. Dow industrials off 99 points today. Two 10% finished at 44,148. The Nasdaq surged 347. One and eight tenths percent. 20,034. Nasdaq passing the 20,000 barrier for the first time. The S&P 500 added 49 points. Eight 10%. 6,048. So 6,084, rather. 6,084. Among the categories where prices are rising, getting back to inflation, Housing, food furnishing, used in new vehicles and health care. So in no particular order, Mid America apartment communities, one of the biggest owners of rental housing in the United states, down a 10th percent. General Mills, maker of everything from cereal to snacks, descended 1%. Wayfair, one of the biggest online furniture retailers, up 4/10 of 1%. Today. You're listening to Marketplace.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

VantageScore is the fastest growing and most predictive credit score used by 8 out of the 10 largest banks and over 34 banks, fintechs and other companies nationwide. VantageScore is mandated for use for mortgages. Funded by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. VantageScore drives financial inclusions by scoring approximately 33 million more consumers than competitive credit scores. VantageScore. Good for credit. Credit for good. Learn [e-mail] hey everybody, it's Kai.

[Kai Rysdal]

Listen, is it time to upgrade your car? Give it new life by donating it to Marketplace. We'll use the proceeds to bring you more news about finance and the economy and how they affect you. Let us turn your old car into a donation to power the journalism you rely on. Go to marketplace.orgvehicle to donate your car today. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rysdal. Alright, here's another data point from today's CPI. The cost of childcare last month went up 6/10 of 1%. To be clear, that is not year over year. That is November alone. And that kind of increase has been happening for years. The average cost to enroll a child in licensed daycare in this country is more than $15,000 per child per year. And that's affecting parents exactly the way you'd think it's affecting parents, maybe more so. Stacey Vanek Smith has that one.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

Amber Lord knew she wanted to keep working after she had her baby. She was in her late 30s and she had a career she loved in marketing. But when Lord and her husband started looking at daycares near their home in Virginia beach, they ran into a problem. They were 25,000 a year. That was for four days a week. And even on those four days, daycare didn't cover an eight hour workday. They would need supplemental care on top of that. We were like, okay, we can't. This, we can't make this make sense. Like, I would just be working 100% of the time to have my child in childcare 100% of the time. Lorde's husband was the bigger earner, but her paycheck was vital. They needed her income to afford their mortgage. We might have lost our house. I mean, it was that bad. And Lord wasn't going to be able to shift her position to part time. The stress got so bad, Lord started to worry it was affecting her pregnancy. So I, I left. Lorde had just walked away from a job she loved and her family's money situation was now very shaky. I came home and I sat in a new house that we just bought. And I'm just sitting here crying, pregnant and just feeling like there's no village. There is no village. Like I live in a country where they don't, they don't care. The cost of preschool and daycare has risen by about 26% since 2019, according to the government's monthly inflation numbers. Lord says it's created a crisis. When she posted about her dilemma on TikTok, thousands of women wrote to her. So many other mothers told me this. It makes more sense financially for them to stay home and take care of the baby and just live strapped on their husband's paycheck. Lorde also hears from women who have had to keep working, but because they couldn't afford the childcare they wanted, were forced to leave their children in situations they did not always feel great about. Lorde says she hears these stories every day about how the rising cost of childcare is forcing women to make really tough choices. You're asking young families to spend, you know, a college tuition to have their child taken care of. Lauren Bauer is an economist with the Brookings Institution. We give people 20 years to save up for college and we give them no time to save up for childcare. She says all of this is happening right after mothers had been entering the workforce in record numbers. This post Covid environment was really good for women. We got this boost of additional childcare funds, the boost of telework flexibility, the boost of a hot labor market, and we are seeing all of those things dissipate. The money has definitely dissipated. The Biden administration's $24 billion child care subsidy expired last year. At the same time, the cooling job market has companies scaling back flexible work. The result, the share of working mothers with children under five has dropped from nearly 71% last year to 68%. What that meant, that's hundreds of thousands of women dropping out of the labor force in the past 18 months. Nobel Prize winning economist Claudia Goldin has spent her career studying women work and the labor market. She says the biggest thing any country can do to support women working is to lower childcare costs. Every country that has highly subsidized childcare has pretty high levels of female labor force participation. Sweden being a good example. Also Canada, France and Germany have all seen women's labor participation increase after government subsidies reduce childcare costs. Back in Virginia Beach, a very pregnant and newly unemployed Amber Lord decided she would make her own job. She used her skills in social media and marketing to start a consulting business. I really went hard, so I pretty much replaced my previous income like within the first year. That would be Lorde's 2 year old son Henry in the background. He's running around chatty. As much as Lord has loved being home with Henry, she does wish she could have him in daycare part time. Because we just spend every waking moment together face to face, which is, you know, great. It's very cool. I love him to pieces. He's the best thing that's ever happened to me. But just to give me some free time to work, to get things done, or just to rest. In New York, I'm Stacey Vanek Smith for Marketplace.

[Kai Rysdal]

While one predicts the future at one's peril, it's entirely possible that the work of getting goods into and around this economy could get a lot more expensive and complicated in the New Year for two reasons. First, on 15 January, a temporary agreement between dock workers and port operators on the east coast expires. That was the deal you'll remember that the two sides made after that quick strike back in October. And reason number two is that five days after that, on January 20, President elect Donald Trump takes office, bringing with him those promises of broad based tariffs. Which gets us to this the National Retail Federation reported this week that imports have been rising and could remain high as companies try to get ahead of those disruptions. I know you thought, perhaps hoped that supply chain stories were a thing of the past, but higher imports are going to stress oil all the links in the supply chain shipping, trucking, even warehouse space marketplaces, Henry App reports.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

One good result of the mess the pandemic made of the supply chain is that companies invested in more capacity. But it took a while, says Jason Miller at Michigan State University, to go from the idea of we would like to put a warehouse in this location to having a facility open that can now store goods. That is an extended process now that extra warehouse capacity ordered a few years ago is available, says Joe Dunlap at Legacy Investing.

[Kai Rysdal]

There's been a ample amount of warehousing space for the past 12 months or.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

So, which means all that stuff coming into the US right now has a place to get stored, and a lot of it is coming to the west coast, says Ian Britton. He manages industrial real estate for CBRE in Southern California. The companies that we've interviewed are taking in anywhere from 20 to 25% more finished goods and components in anticipation of tariffs. Britain says companies have also shifted west because of the strike threats in the East. Normally, he says, all those extra imports would translate to an uptick in companies leasing out that available warehouse space. But it hasn't just resulted in that direct correlation of leasing volume like we've typically seen in typical cycles. That ample warehouse space is now verging on a glut. One part of the supply chain that's a bit tight, says Jason Miller at Michigan State, are railroads in the West. They've been busy transporting those record volumes of freight from Western ports, and that type of prolonged strain does cause some kinks to emerge in the system. For now, he says, if the railroads get too tied up, there's plenty of capacity in the trucking sector too, which can take the pressure off. I'm Henry Epp for Marketplace.

[Kai Rysdal]

I know I ended the program yesterday with a report from Pew Research showing a majority of you are satisfied with your jobs. Counterpoint, a survey from Gallup that says 51% of American workers are watching for or actively seeking a new job. So Maybe the grass is always greener. But making that leap into a new job or a career can be daunting. And it can be daunting no matter how old you are. Here's today's installment of our series, My economy.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

I am Dr. Michelle McKinney Jones, and I am a faculty fellow in management at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. So after 31 years in corporate America, and at the age of 55, I retired and made a career switch into higher education on July 1st. In one profession for 31 years. Gives you an appreciation for that profession. And it's also something that never leaves you, right? I often have my HR hat on when I'm sitting in faculty meetings. Maybe there's a comment that said, and I'm like, oh, I'm glad I'm not in HR right now to be able to address that. Or maybe it's something that a student says if we're doing an exercise and how their role playing as an HR professional, and perhaps they say something that I'm able to advise them to say, hey, that would not be an appropriate comment. Let's talk about how we can either say that differently or do that differently to make sure that we get the desired outcome. So, yeah, I'm always wearing my HR hat, but now I get to wear two. Certainly the salary as a faculty fellow does not compare to what I made in the corporate space. And so there's, you know, there's some adjustment there. But the decision that I made to go into higher ed, does it outweigh all of those other things? Absolutely. And so would I do anything different? Absolutely not. And while some might think, you know, you should be enjoying retirement, guess what? I am. Every day, I'm doing something that I enjoy doing. And it is continually what fuels me each and every day. And when I see a look on the student's face when a light bulb goes off on something that we're talking about and they finally get it, that's the most rewarding thing ever. It's the best. It is the absolute best.

[Kai Rysdal]

Dr. Michelle McKinney Jones. She is a faculty fellow at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. Here's a true story. I started as an intern in public radio when I was 34, two careers behind me, so it can work out. Tell us what's going on with you, would you? You can do it at marketplace.org myeconomy this final note on the way out today. After the idea was approved by team owners back in August, today the deal finally got done. The NFL's Buffalo Bills and the Miami Dolphins have each sold minority ownership stakes 10% to be exact, to different private equity groups. Key points of the approval are that those stakes have to be held for at least six years, and one private equity group can hold interest in as many as six teams. There is a teensy tiny bit of what could possibly go wrong here rattling around in the back o my brain. Our media production team includes Brian Allison, Jake Cherry, Justin Dueler, Drew Josdad, Gary O'Keefe, Charlton Thorpe, Juan Carlos Tirado, and Becca Weinman. Jeff Peters is the manager of media production and I'm Kai Rysdal. We will see you tomorrow everybody.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

Foreign.

[Kai Rysdal]

This is apm.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

Hi, this is Michael from Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania. Marketplace is both enjoyable and extremely informative.

[Kai Rysdal]

Kai and the reporters go out to all kinds of people in the community and they ask straight ahead questions like.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

How are you holding up these days?

[Kai Rysdal]

It's very personal and as we listen we get a good sense of the challenges people face as they are trying.

[Stacey Vanek Smith]

To make it from day to day.

[Kai Rysdal]

I listen to the Marketplace podcasts every day and have been doing so for a number of years. It's a breath of fresh air that helps me understand the economic world better. Join me by making a gift to [e-mail] market donate.