There's no business like dough business

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This message comes from US. Bank. Simplify how you do business with Business Essentials, a powerful combination of no monthly maintenance fee checking and card payment processing. Deposit products are offered by US. Bank National Association, member FDIC.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:16)
This is Planet Money from NPR.

**Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi** (0:21)
A few months back, Planet Money got a little economic bat signal from our friends over at the podcast Hyperfixed. Hyperfixed is hosted by one of my longtime favorite radio heads, Alex Goldman. He was previously one of the hosts of Reply All.
For each episode, Hyperfixed takes on listener problems, big and small, and sets out to solve them.

**Alex Goldman** (0:41)
Yeah, we get questions as small as a listener said, hey, my favorite bakery shut down and now I can no longer get the cake that I love. So we got Claire Safitz, Baker extraordinaire to help us figure out the recipe.

**Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi** (0:52)
Love that question.

**Alex Goldman** (0:54)
We also get questions like, should I have children, which as you might imagine is a more difficult question to answer.

**Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi** (0:59)
Yeah, that's a bigger, scarier one. But thank you for looking into it.

**Alex Goldman** (1:05)
Yeah, I do my best. But the question that made us think of you guys was from a listener named Jed Kronfeld, because he wanted to talk about his local subway stop.

**Jed Kronfeld** (1:14)
To call it just a subway station, it's underplaying it a little bit.

**Alex Goldman** (1:18)
Jed's lived in Brooklyn for the last five years, and the question on his mind had to do with the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center Station.

**Jed Kronfeld** (1:25)
It connects like nine or ten different lines, and then it leads to a terminal for the Long Island Railroad. Then on top of that is a whole other layer that is a mall.

**Alex Goldman** (1:37)
To understand Jed's question, you first have to understand what this complex looks like. The Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center Station is consistently ranked as the number one busiest station in Brooklyn. The reason it's so busy is because this one hub connects downtown Brooklyn to the rest of New York City.
It's home to a massive arena. The Brooklyn Nets play there. It's a huge concert venue where you can see artists like Bad Bunny, Bruce Springsteen, Charlie XCX.
So the subway station itself is super bustling. It's got multiple levels. And then on top of that, you have a shopping mall. And it's in this Escher-like maze that Jed first noticed something strange.

**Jed Kronfeld** (2:15)
On the upper end, in the mall, there is one Wetzel's Pritzels.
And it looks like any Wetzel's Pretzels. And then within the system, on the top floor, there is a Wetzel's Pretzels. And on the bottom floor, there is another Wetzel's Pretzels. 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** (2:45)
If you were to walk a circuit between all of them, how far away are they from one another?

**Jed Kronfeld** (2:50)
You could get to all of them within a minute. It's really that quick.

**Alex Goldman** (2:54)
Wow. When did you notice that there were three Wetzel's Pretzels locations?

**Jed Kronfeld** (3:00)
By the time I moved into Brooklyn, 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'm like, what are we doing?
This is excessive.

**Alex Goldman** (3:19)
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 Barclays Station. 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 we started looking into this and it turned out the Atlantic Avenue Barclays Station was not the only instance of this sort of Wetzel's cluster. Turns out there are also three Wetzel's Pretzels at the American Dream Mall in New Jersey. At the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, California, there are three Wetzel's Pretzels. And at the crypto.com Arena where the LA Lakers play, there are five Wetzel's Pretzels locations. 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.
And that's when we decided to call you, Alexi, to try and solve Jed's little mystery.