US Malls Aren't Dead Yet & Americans Want $80k for a New Job

0:01Stop waiting for customers to fall into your funnel. It's 2025, and the same old strategies are, well, just kind of old. That's where Amazon ads can make a difference. Brands using four Amazon ad solutions saw dramatically higher growth compared to limited approaches. Our latest Marketing Brew article breaks down how they can help you reach customers everywhere they are, from prime video to Alexa to shopping with consistent messaging. Read the whole thing at marketingbrew.com slash amazon dash ads. Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. On today's pod, Americans reveal the minimum salary it would take for them to quit their current job for another.

0:40And Denmark's economy is riding high thanks to the Messi-like performance of just a single company. Then the amount of car models selling for under$20 ,000 in America will shock you. Plus, the youths have a new TikTok-fueled obsession with a pickle sweatshirt that has ByteDance laughing all the way to the bank. It's Tuesday, August 22nd. Let's ride.

1:07Okay, Neil, let's start today's show off with a little celeb gossip. So Jack Antonoff, Taylor Swift's close collaborator, songwriter, and producer, got married and Taylor spoke at the wedding. But here's the absurd part. Her toast lasted 15 minutes. So according to reports, she did have the guests in stitches. But Neil, a 15-minute toast? I do not care if you're the Pope. You cannot give a 15-minute toast. The problem here is that Taylor Swift does not have the correct feedback loop. She's been playing three and a half hour concerts to sold out football stadiums all over the country for the entire summer.

1:42So no one's telling her to stop anything. So why would she not give a 15 minute toast? But people like us, they're like, OK, 25 minute podcast, like we're done with you. But Taylor Swift, you know, people are literally waiting outside the football stadium to hear her sing, not even paying to go in. So no one's ever told her to stop doing anything in her life. So why wouldn't she go 15, 20, 25 minutes for Toast, which we all know is too long, even for her. Yeah, five minutes up and down. This is the all-too-well Taylor's version of Toast. Apparently, there was also a tattoo artist on hand at this wedding in case any guest wanted to get a permanent tattoo commemorating the wedding, which is another wild move to assume that your guests are going to want to immortalize this moment forever.

2:25forever. So celeb weddings, man, they're just built different. All you need is a photo booth. That would entertain anybody. Seriously. All right. To kick off the show, I want to talk about malls and brick and mortar retail, which by my unofficial tally, were supposed to have died 75 times by now. First, Amazon and e-commerce were predicted to wipe them off the map. Then COVID was supposed to turn us all into a nation of online shoppers by forcing stores to close. But in a major narrative violation, malls and physical stores are thriving. According to new research, retailers are on track to open 1000 new stores on net this year in the US.

3:01The availability of retail space is down to 4.8%, the lowest level on record, while mall foot traffic is up over 10 % since before the pandemic. As we hear all this doom and gloom about commercial real estate, retail is putting the team on its back while offices flounder. My takeaway here is that people just love to shop and be together in person. We've had every opportunity not to with e-commerce and COVID, and yet we are still going to stores and malls because for many things we buy, it is just preferable. But I'm curious to hear what you think. Yeah, the leasing numbers really stood out to me because anything, occupancy rates are the number one indicator of a mall's health.

3:40And malls are leased at 95 % as of last year, top tier malls were. So it's kind of crazy because we've seen these pieces, you're right, that where it's like animal shelters, retail apocalypse, but like animal shelters were coming in to fill empty space in malls. Pickleball courts were coming in to fill empty space in malls, but apparently there's just not that much empty space in malls at all. So I do think you said narrative violation, like this is just a classic. You actually look at the data and malls are doing way better than expected. The thing here for why occupancy rates are so high and why vacancy for retail is so low is that we had so much retail space over the past decade.

4:18At one point, we had 23.6 square feet of retail space per person in 2015 in the U.S. Just to give you a sense, that is so much. That's more than twice the amount in Australia and about five times the amount of U.K. and other European countries. So in the early 2000s, we built way too much space for retail. Then the 2008 financial crisis happened. They stopped building retail. And all of a sudden, all of our, you know, all the retail spaces have now kind of filled in to where we have this very healthy environment where reds are rising and this retail apocalypse never materialized. Yeah. And then, I mean, just to tap on another big retailer that we've seen go out of business recently, Bed Bath & Beyond, which was a mainstay of malls, which helps contribute to the idea that malls are dying.

5:02the fact that Bed Bath & Beyond went under. Landlords are kind of happy to get those spaces back because Bed Bath & Beyond occupied those spaces for a long time. Now they can lease it to a new tenant and they can raise rents on that. And then also it just gives new life to a mall. I mean, for the last generation, we've seen Bed Bath & Beyond was always one of those anchor tenants in malls. And so now we might be seeing some new blood in there. And a lot of people are saying malls should be this living, breathing organism where brands go in and out of style. So it shouldn't just be like the same tenants over decades.

5:36And so Bed Bath & Beyond going under might have been a boost for mall culture. Let's talk about what stores, I said at the beginning that 1 ,000 new stores are opening and just, it's kind of interesting to see what kind of stores are opening. So the number one is always dollar stores. So nationwide dollar stores are signing the most leases again this year. That is just something you can bet the bank on. Even if you predicted it, we wouldn't have to do the inverse Toby because that is all it. You can always count on dollar stores, dollar generals opening thousands of stores. And then another one that might be surprising to you is crunch fitness.

6:09So gyms are releasing a lot of new space and you're talking about malls now becoming more experiential and people go there, not just to shop, but to actually hang out. Yeah. There's like go-karting, trampolining, virtual reality arcades, which is honestly what I want to do when I go to a mall is I love the experiential aspect. So they are social. That was an overlooked part of it is like how big of a social hub malls are for young people, especially. You go to the mall and hang out. Yeah. I mean, Gen Z, there was a survey. Gen Z went to malls more than any other age cohort. 73 % of Gen Z shoppers said they visited a mall in the past month.

6:46I know. More so than millennials, which was 65%, and Gen X was 48%. Where else are you going to go as a kid? You've got to go to the mall. That's the hangout spot. Okay, Neil, let's move on. and I want us to flash back to five years ago. I was soon to be graduating college. Corona was just the name of a beer and there were about a dozen cars for sale under$20 ,000. But now I'm a grizzled podcast host. We experienced a pandemic and there is precisely one car under$20 ,000 for sale in the US. Yes, one car, the Mitsubishi Mirage, a sedan that gets 39 miles to the gallon and tops out at a whopping 76 horsepower.

7:26is the only car on U.S. dealership lots that will set you back less than that$20 ,000 number. Now, here's the crazy part. No one's really buying it. U.S. sales of the Mirage came in at only$5 ,316 the first half of the year, which is 44 % lower than last year. Neil, we've talked about this before on the show, but cars are getting way bigger and way more expensive. But man, is it crazy to see only one car coming in below that$20 ,000 number. Are you surprised no one's buying this car? with all the big cars on the road and, you know, the machismo of Americans that they're going to get this little Mitsubishi?

8:01I don't know. Well, I would expect, I mean, 39 miles to the gallon. It's not a hybrid or electric. It just has a really small engine. I mean, 76 horsepower. That takes a while to giddy up and go. Well, yeah, you mentioned the price of cars is just absolutely skyrocketing. The average is now just above$48 ,000 for a new car. That's 25 % more than before the pandemic. Why are car prices going up? We should probably talk about that. You mentioned no small cars. Every single car manufacturer has kind of ditched the concept of a compact vehicle. That just kind of doesn't exist anymore. They've seen that SUVs and bigger trucks are much more profitable.

8:41So they've invested all of their production into making bigger cars. And then there was this supply shortage with chips and other input materials that go into cars, and they had to jack up their prices for that, or so they say. But car makers are doing really well right now, and a lot of consumers are feeling pain because you need a car in the U.S. to kind of unlock a lot of economic opportunity, but it's becoming kind of out of reach. This really reminded me of what's happening in the housing market, where the start, quote unquote, starting car is becoming so unaffordable relative to the starting home, which also nobody can afford these days.

9:21I think just the stat that really shows the sign of the times is that there are currently 32 models in the United States that sell for an average price of over$100 ,000. That's crazy. As recently as 2018, there was only 12 models that sold for over$100 ,000. So that's becoming more and more of the norm is a six-figure car. I mean, it's just crazy that people are paying that much for a vehicle when you used to be able to get a couple under$20 ,000. So I think that stat alone just shows how big the car market has become and how big cars themselves have become. And luxury cars. I don't know. It feels like a market failure here.

9:59The only way prices will come down is if consumers say, look, this is too expensive. I'm not going to buy. I'm going to keep my Toyota Camry going for 15, 20 years, which they can do. And I think if they do that, car dealerships are going to get kind of overloaded with inventory and they're going to have to slash prices and discounts, which doesn't seem to be happening now because prices are still through the roof. But eventually you have to say, you know, the consumer has to put their foot down and help with inflation in the car market and say, look, this is too expensive. I can't do it. But like I said, it's kind of a catch 22 because you need a car to get around to go to work.

10:31And a lot, I mean, a lot of people are saying the only way the return of the$20 ,000 car happens if China enters the market and kind of makes a new low cost model. But people are saying there's just no way that happens. China is not going to enter the U.S. market in any way due to just like the geopolitical problem. So it looks like R.I.P. to the twenty thousand dollar car. We missed our car buying window, Neil. I got a car for under twenty thousand, but it was beat up. But I love that thing. All right. For this next story, I have a question for you, Toby. What salary would it take for you to leave this job for another one?

11:08I won't make you answer. I won't make you answer. But I do have the number for the typical American, about$79 ,000. According to a new survey from the New York Fed, the average lowest salary Americans would be willing to accept for a new job rose to nearly$79 ,000 a year, which is the highest on record. That's up from about 73K in July 2022 and 62K before the pandemic. This growing wage floor, which is what economists call the minimum salary you'd want to take another job, is a sign of the tight labor market we're in. where despite numerous calls of a recession, workers still feel like they have leverage over their employers.

11:45A few other tidbits I thought were interesting from this report. The gender gap in pay expectations for men, the salary they leave the current job for is$25 ,000 more than women. But women's salary expectations are surging, growing at twice as fast as men in the past year. So while women don't expect to be paid nearly as much, they are increasingly aiming for much more. I have an answer to your question, though, Neil. And my answer has a lot of commas in it. So three commas at least, if anyone wants to pry me away. This trend, though, it's been an accelerating trend over the last few years. There's an 8 % increase from just a year ago, and it's the highest level ever in a data series that goes back to 2014.

12:27So people are definitely setting their bar high for what their switch rate would be. And then over the past three years, the level of the switch rate has risen more than 22%. So it really is one of those things where it's kind of rising in line with inflation as well, which is this number makes a lot of central bankers a little nervous because wages drive inflation. And so the higher the starting wages, that 2 % inflation number becomes more and more difficult to hit. So even though you look at it and say high wage is great, like strong labor market grade, this is the thing that keeps Jerome Powell up at night is that these starting salaries are just so dang high these days.

13:08The good news about that is there were a couple of years when we had this high inflation that wages were below inflation. So it was eating away at your pocketbook. But now for the, you know, in the past couple of quarters, wages are actually growing faster than inflation. So that's good news on that front. But yes, you're right. It does. It does worry Jerome Powell a little bit. Another few interesting tidbits from this report, early retirements, more people are expecting to retire below 62 percent. The average expect or 62 years old, the average expected likelihood of working beyond age 62 for Americans surveyed in this in this report declined to just 47 percent from from nearly 49 percent in July 2022.

13:49So which was so interesting, because remember, we talked about how more 60 and 70 year olds were working further and further into the workforce. but it looks like they started working and they're like, well, it's not all it cracked up to be. You know what? I think it is. It's the 401k millionaires. Oh yeah. We talked about that. There was a record number of 401k or almost a record of 401k millionaires. So they're looking at their 401k. They're like, eh, maybe I don't have to work past 62 and I can dive into social security early. But look, the stock market is a fickle beast and it could come back down.

14:17So it's all fitting together. It's all making sense. Retiring at 62 would be crazy. I've never, I wouldn't. We're still going to be here. We're going to be in this very studio at 62. Okay, Neil, before we jump into our next story, we're going to take a quick break. In America, half of every dollar spent on brand medicines goes to entities who don't make them. While middlemen like PBMs and 340B hospitals drive up costs, Biopharma is investing$500 billion in new infrastructure and manufacturing here at home and helping patients buy medicines directly at lower prices. Tell Washington to end middlemen markups and put American patients first.

14:58Visit phrma.org slash middlemen. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast? Smart move. Being financially savvy? Smart move. Another smart move? Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling, just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. Neil, we are back with another edition of Toby's Trends, where I, a young whippersnapper, educate you, an adept maven of the news cycle, about a certain trend that has caught my eye recently, and that trend is pickles.

15:47Yes, the new hottest thing that the youths are buying, showing off, and rocking on TikTok is a$44 sweatshirt that has various jars of pickles screen printed on it. It's from an online store called Bad Addiction, which the founder describes as a boutique for hot mess anxious moms. Now, there are two parts to this trend I want to break down in particular. First, the Pickles sweatshirt has gone viral right as TikTok has begun heavily pushing its TikTok shop feature that lets you buy items straight from within the app. And two, Gen Z's obsession with Pickles is a full-blown generational love story at this point.

16:26Remember back in the mid-2000s when millennials got obsessed with bacon? Well, I do because it was super lame. But now Gen Z is falling into the same exact trap with Pickles. So, Neil, which side of this trend do you want to tackle first? Let's start with pickles. Because I'm curious about the obsession with pickles. I've always liked pickles. I haven't seen it as a marker of social status, but clearly it is now. Because if you want to show off your love of pickles. So I'm just thinking about in my mind right now why people are obsessed with pickles. Or why people want to show off that they're obsessed with pickles.

16:57I guess there's a level of sophistication to pickles because they're pickled. It's not just a straight cucumber. There's a taste associated with it. There's dimensions to pickles. and, you know, people love pickleback shots as well when it comes to drinking in a little more interesting way. So maybe that's why you want to show off your love of pickles. It's like a level of sophistication, also nostalgia going back to maybe a lot of Jewish people like myself would love to show off their love of pickles to go back to our roots. There's like a couple of places on the Lower East Side in New York where you can go and get, you know, there's very old school pickle places where you can go.

17:33I think it's just a salty snack, honestly. And it's a more sophisticated salty snack. Like, come on, it's better than like eating a Cheez-It or something like that or a cracker. It is, it gives you like that little hit of salt. And then also I do think that generations, like millennials really embraced bacon and like every shirt was, just had like these kind of cringy like bacon slogans on it. And so now Gen Z is entering into their kind of embrace of a food era. And I think that that food has become pickles. But I also want to talk about this other part of the trend is the fact that TikTok shop is becoming this thing that a lot of people are seeing appearing in their feeds.

18:10And it actually launched last November in 2022, but ahead of kind of the holiday season, TikTok is really ramping it up, rolling it out to its full user base. And this has a legitimate chance to kind of unseat some of the major, the Amazons of the world, the Tmuz, the Shiennes of the world, because you can literally just scroll a video, see this like pickle sweatshirt, buy it from within the app. And it just removes that entire friction of having to sign out via checkout on another website. It also is just like, it's like a behavioral economics thing where you can, if you can do it within the app with zero friction, you don't get that kind of buyer's remorse type thing.

18:49It reduces that unpleasant feeling of having to check out. So I do think that this has a chance to really upend the e-commerce world. And I mean, users are kind of wise to it though, because they keep seeing these shop features. They keep seeing this pickle sweatshirt everywhere they look. And so they're kind of saying that this is TikTok just like accepting TikTok shop. I would love to see if people are actually buying the pickle sweatshirt through TikTok shop. Having a bunch of social media companies tried to do the in-app shopping feature like Meta and Instagram. They have. You don't really hear a lot about it, but maybe TikTok is a different beast.

19:22Yeah, they are because remember the$400 billion live streaming industry in China. So they're very good at prompting users to buy something within an app. Okay, our next story is about Denmark. Toby, you and I both know that Denmark has had some very famous exports over the years, Legos, Carlsberg beer, legendary goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel, but one of its products is becoming so popular that it's having a major impact on Denmark's economy. I'll give our listeners a second to pause the recording if they want to guess. The product is semaglutide drugs like Ozempic and Wigovi, those diabetes and weight loss medications that Americans are hoarding like Four Loko in 2010.

20:01Those drugs are made by the Danish pharma company Novo Nordisk, and their popularity is having a major impact on the country's economy. First of all, thanks to the promise of these obesity drugs, Novo Nordisk's market cap has grown to about$419 billion, which is more than the entire GDP of Denmark. Danish drug makers in general have lifted Danish economic growth by almost two percentage points alone over the last two years. Plus, so much money is coming into Novo Nordisk from the U.S. that it's flooding the Danish economy with dollars, causing the central bank to keep interest rates lower than the European Central Bank.

20:37Those lower interest rates make buying a home cheaper in Denmark than the rest of Europe. Plus, with all the money flooding into Novo, economists expect a period of strong job gains. So, some people are now comparing Denmark to a petro state like Saudi Arabia, But instead of becoming rich through oil, it's becoming rich through weight loss drugs. I think they should use the money to buy back golf from Saudi Arabia. It is truly amazing how big this company has become in kind of just the last two years alone. I do think it's also camouflaging a couple of weak spots in the economy because economists were saying that without Novo Nordisk, so Denmark's GDP grew 1 % in the last quarter, but without Novo Nordisk, it would have actually shrunk.

21:17It would have been negative 1%. So you are seeing Novo Nordisk kind of come in and paper over a lot of some other weaknesses of the Denmark economy. It's very much a, this is like a classic college group project. One person is doing all the work and everyone else is just absolutely lazy. Exactly. It is crazy, though, that it's literally affecting the housing market, though, because they're keeping interest rates lower. So you can get a more affordable house than in other places in the Nordic states simply because Americans love this one drug so much. So the ripple effects are truly amazing. The risk, obviously, though, is when you're concentrated in one company so much.

21:54You just look at your neighbor, Finland, which Nokia was this huge company. At one point, it accounted for 4 % of the country's GDP and 70 % of its value on the stock exchange. But then the iPhone was released. Nokia handsets started falling in sales. then 2008 hit and Finland entered a decade of like economic stagnation. So there are risks when you are, when you have one person in the group project that does all the work because that person is out sick and then you're done. Oh, I know that was me. Neil. So I also put together a little quiz for you. I went through and found which companies had the biggest market cap in each country.

22:36So I'll give you the country and I want you to give me the company that has the biggest market. Let's go. Listeners can play along too. So we're going to start off easy with Japan. Toyota. Toyota,$264 billion market cap. Then the UK. I will say AstraZeneca. It is AstraZeneca. Let's go. Another, I was thinking you were going to say like BP or Shell or something like that, but it's AstraZeneca, which is another pharma company that has done really well in the last few years. Okay, Italy, I'm actually going to ask you not for the number one, but for the number two. uh i will say ferrari it is ferrari so nl is is the top one which is an electric and utility company but that's no thank you that was very nice okay and then i'll give you a choice between india and turkey for the last one um maybe just both oh india is it uh the adani group it's reliance industries yeah which is just like a big conglomerate big conglomerate turkey what's the industry i can't give you the industry because really it would it would give it away is it like shipbuilding or something it has to do with transportation is it turkish air turkish airlines yeah so turkey turkish airlines only a 13 billion dollar market cap so i don't know i knew neil would get all those he's he's pretty plugged into everything okay neil let's move on to our last story of the day where unfortunately i might be moving on from morning brew daily because a new gig just opened up and it's got my name all over it.

24:02That's because after 25 years, the voice of Super Mario is up for grabs after Charles Martinet is stepping down from his role to become a Mario ambassador. Now, Martinet is a legend of the voice acting world. He's voiced Mario, Luigi, as well as their evil counterparts, Wario and Waluigi, in more than 100 gaming titles. He actually holds the Guinness World Record for most voiceover performances of the same character in a video game. Here's my favorite detail about Martinette becoming Mario. So he crashed an audition for Nintendo in the 90s, and he got a single prompt from the casting director.

24:39And here's the prompt. You're an Italian plumber from Brooklyn for this company called Nintendo. The character's name is Mario. Make up a voice. So Charles started listing off instructions on how to make a pizza in Mario's now famous Italian flecked falsetto, and he got the part. his first gig a 1994 cd cd rom game called mario teaches typing so neil it's the end of an era for martinette and mario and i'm a little sad because i feel like he just missed this huge payday after chris pratt took over the role for the super mario pros movie toby you can't just tease us and say this is the perfect role for you honestly uh i think we need to find a new host i'm not gonna That was pretty good.

25:23Thank you. Thank you. No, this is like the Mario voice is so iconic. And there was such a controversy around when Chris Pratt came in and did the voice for the Super Mario Bros. movie. So they're going to have to figure out a way to make Mario like Mickey, which just like live on forever. So apparently he does have a huge bank of words. He says there are over 5 million audio files of me recording Mario because he would go into the studio and he would record 45 takes of every sound he could think of. So technically, we could hear Martinet's voice for a while going forward. I don't know if Nintendo is actually going to do that, but 5 million audio files.