Behind the Tiny Desk and other listener questions

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0:14Co-hosts, come in. This is Adrian Ma. Weyland Wong reporting for duty. Darian Woods, present. I'm getting a reading on my radar of some urgent economic questions coming in from around the galaxy. You know what? People across the cosmos have questions about economics, and I think we must rise to the occasion and answer. This is The Indicator from Planet Money. Today we're talking about why storefronts across the country are staying empty, how NPR's very own tiny desk got so big, and whether there is a correct level of employee turnover. We have our prime directive, and that's to answer your questions after the break.

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1:34Maybe it's full of brave first leaps, tearful goodbyes, and everything in between. And with over 100 years of experience, your Edward Jones Financial Advisor can help. Edward Jones, member SIPC. This message comes from Capital One. Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank for details. Capital One N.A., member FDIC. All right, listen to questions. Up first, a question from Chaitan Sharma. My name is Chetan, and I live in downtown Seattle. A lot of the storefronts in my area have sat empty for years.

2:15One would think that property owners would lower the rent until businesses finally moved in, but they aren't. So what's happening here? When looking at this topic, the first thing to note here is that retail stores aren't doing well at the moment. More than 5 ,000 brick-and-mortar stores have closed so far this year, according to CoreSite. that's a place that tracks store closures and openings across the U.S. It's almost a 50 % jump from a year ago. I feel like I can guess the reasons. We're talking effects of the pandemic, people shifting their buying from brick and mortar to online. Yeah, that's definitely true.

2:51And in Seattle, where the listener's from, crime and lagging retail sales in particular are causing businesses to get out of there. Major stores have pulled out from downtown like Nike, Saks off Fifth Avenue, and the North Face. So to Chathan's question, why is it that the landlords don't just lower the rent and get those spaces filled up with whoever wants to pay? Yeah, so it's not that simple. We spoke to one landlord slash retail advisor who explained that you'd be hurting yourself with the other existing tenants. Oh, right, because if you lowered your rent by that much, it would then show your hand to existing tenants who would then be like, oh, I want that deal.

3:29But I mean, if no one's willing to lease it, couldn't they just let someone take it over for a while, do something creative with it? That's actually happening. Seattle has a whole organization dedicated to making use of this empty space. It's called Seattle Restored, and it helps set up pop-up shops, it holds events, and it curates art installations around the city. Ooh, that's so fun. I want to start a pop-up shop in an abandoned store, especially if it's, like, maybe haunted. That could be fun. Good for October. Good for October. Investors, you know who to get in touch with. Thank you, Darian.

4:01And on to our next question. My name is Salcedo Salcedo. Can you do an episode about the economics of an NPR Tiny Desk concert? How does it make money and get such famous people to go on it? Okay, so who here is a fan of Tiny Desk? I love it so much. And what I love most about it is people who don't necessarily listen to NPR know where I work now. And finally, put us on the map. Yeah, anybody have any favorites? Mine is definitely T-Pain when he took off his auto-tune and revealed his beautiful voice. I really like Deliveria Rodrigo. I love her. Ooh, I actually still need to see that one. It delivers!

4:37And if you are somehow not familiar with Tiny Desk, this is NPR's concert series where artists squeeze into this little corner of the NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C. Yeah, so it's this amazing challenge for the artist with stripped-back sets and fewer musicians. And it's been amazing what huge guests they've had. like the Wu-Tang Clan, Dua Lipa, Justin Timberlake, just to name a few. So big names come to the Tiny Desk, but it wasn't always this way. We reached out to Bobby Carter, who's the host and series producer for Tiny Desk concerts. And he says back in 2008, when it was beginning, they had Tiny X on the Tiny Desk.

5:19It checks out. Yes. There wasn't some grand plan to one day have like, you know, world known artists on the show. It was osmosis. It was organic. It was grassroots. It wasn't, we weren't aiming to get bigger bands, per se. It just sort of happened. So, slowly the show starts to expand. They start bringing in new bands and branching out to different genres. And then they had this viral moment that really changed things for Tiny Desk. And that is your favorite concert, Darian, T-Pain. That was the one that really, really kicked the door down. It was our first viral moment.

6:02I do know you. I know you very well. Even better now. This is the perfect example of what Tiny Zest can offer. You know, he's known for his auto-tune, but in the setting he has this reflective, acoustic vibe that nobody else has captured before. From there the floodgates opened and it was off to the races, I think. They started booking the really big acts that brought in millions of views on YouTube. Some of the most viewed Tiny Desk concerts include Anderson.Paak, who got 109 million views on YouTube. Dua Lipa with 128 million. That is definitely numbers where you could rake in a lot of cash.

6:38You could. But in fact, I was shocked to learn from talking to Bobby that Tiny Desks doesn't actually make money from YouTube. Oh, so we're doing this as a public service. We're not trying to capitalize. So NPR is not raking in the cash here because Tiny Desk doesn't actually own the music rights. That belongs to publishers and labels who get revenue from all those YouTube views. So Tiny Desk, like you said, is doing it for the love of the game. You know, you can think of it as also music education and part of the mission of NPR to do things for the public, you know, public media. So this is actually a good place to put in a little plug for NPR slash Tiny Desk.

7:17if you are a TinyDesk fan, you know the economics now behind the show. And if you want to support TinyDesk, you can donate to NPR or your local NPR member station. We'll actually put a link to that in the show notes. All right. On to our very last listener question. My name is Paul Winiford from Dallas, Texas. I'm wondering if there are publicly available records of turnover and retention at large publicly traded companies? And is there much consensus about what an ideal amount of turnover is? Thanks. All right. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out a lot of data relevant to Paul's question.

7:56The BLS tracks turnover through a survey which has one of my favorite acronyms, JOLTS. It stands for Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. The BLS tracks retention also through the Employee Tenure Survey. That's a report that tracks how long wage and salary workers have been with a current employer. And so I want to know, how long do workers typically stay with their employer? The median number of years is 4.1 years. That's in 2022. So 4.1 years is down a little bit from 2018 when it was at 4.2 years. I guess it probably depends on how much you like your job too, right? Because if you hate your job, it probably feels like a lot longer.

8:36What is time? Yeah, it's all relative. You know, so for that turnover data, what's interesting is you can see how it breaks down by industry. Like you can compare retail trade compared to professional and business services, which is a big category that includes the tech industry. Now, with layoffs, voluntarily quitting and other separations, retail saw 688 ,000 people leave in July of this year. If you look at professional and business services, that industry saw more than a million people leave. The BLS does not drill down to an individual company's staff turnover or retention levels. It mostly does this at the industry level.

9:16I mean, I guess if you wanted to see like what turnover is at different companies, you could look at public companies, right, that have to file with Securities and Exchange Commission and see if you could find some of those details. But I'm guessing not all companies would actually want to provide those numbers. And interestingly, layoffs aren't actually that high historically. They're even lower than pre-pandemic levels. But layoffs are in the news a lot. And now for the next part of Paul's question, where he asks about the ideal amount of turnover or retention. We're going to turn to Nick Bunker.

9:49He's the research director for North American Economic Research at the Indeed Hiring Lab. Nick says retention is generally a good thing. Anyone who's worked knows that you need some time to sort of ramp up in your position to get good at it. And then people who are around longer have institutional knowledge that can help not only themselves, but, you know, everyone at the company. Yeah, I mean, there's a learning curve for everybody. Thank you to everyone who submitted listener questions. We will be back for more. So please submit any questions you have within the galaxy of economics to indicator at npr.org.

10:28This episode was produced by Cooper Katz-McKim with engineering by Gilly Moon. This fact-tracked by Sierra Juarez. Kate Concannon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.

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