What a Bakery Can Tell Us About the Economy Right Now

Tracy Alloway (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:14)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:16)

Joe, you know we are smack dab in the middle of the holiday season.

Joe Weisenthal (0:20)

That is true.

I have mixed feelings about this time of year, because it's nice to take time off, it's nice to get some breaks, but on the other hand, it means people aren't listening to podcasts as much because of its family. So they're celebrating the holidays, they're outside, they're giving gifts, but that's time, that means fewer listeners.

Tracy Alloway (0:38)

Well, I mean, hopefully some people are still listening to podcasts, especially this one. I actually tend to listen to podcasts more around the holidays, just because I listen to them while I'm cooking and baking.

And Christmas, of course, is prime baking and cooking season.

Joe Weisenthal (0:53)

You know, my wife is baking like 200 cookies today for like various parties and kids' school thing, to set her, I literally just got a text about how time consuming it is.

Tracy Alloway (1:03)

I hope she's listening to Odd Lots while she's doing that. She often does. To make the time pass.

Joe Weisenthal (1:07)

She often does.

Tracy Alloway (1:09)

Well, this kind of got me thinking, you know, it's the holiday season. Everyone is off baking things or probably buying things for presents.

And I really wanted to talk to someone who is in a sort of seasonal retail industry and ask them how they are experiencing the economy right now. Because as we've been discussing for some time, it does feel like we're kind of in this weird environment where there are a lot of concerns about inflation. We still have lingering supply chain constraints. There's a lot of talk about recession. But at the same time, a lot of the hard data that we get is saying that consumer demand is still relatively strong, unemployment is still relatively low, things are sort of ticking along.

And yet a lot of the sentiment surveys seem to indicate something otherwise. So I thought it would be great to speak to a small business owner about what exactly is going on.

Joe Weisenthal (2:03)

Let's do it because baking, bakery is also one of those things. It's like so, it's laborious, it's commodity sensitive, it's rent sensitive, it's seasonal. There's so many things that sort of come together in baked goods, bread, cakes, cookies. So a great way to get a snapshot of what's happening in the economy right now.

Tracy Alloway (2:22)

Yes, it's like we are taking all the ingredients that go into a baking business and dissecting them one by one. Okay, well, without further ado, we are going to be speaking with Ken Jarosch. He is the owner of Jarosch Bakery, which is a bakery in the suburbs of Cook County, Chicago, actually, where I used to live.

Ken, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Ken Jarosch (2:43)

You're welcome, thanks for having me.

Tracy Alloway (2:45)

So how busy are you around this time of year?

Ken Jarosch (2:50)

Extremely. It starts at Halloween and goes through Thanksgiving, and then Christmas or the whole month of December for us, in general, every day is busier than the day before.

So we kind of call it the hello thank miss season, because it's busy. And this year, as you kind of indicated in your introduction, there is still a high demand for our product. That's a wonderful thing. So we're pretty much firing on all cylinders as far as the demand goes. Keeping up with it is another challenge.

Joe Weisenthal (3:27)

So can you just describe like how big is your bakery roughly? I know it's been around since 1959 on your website. It looks like there's a bunch of amazing stuff from specialty cakes and wedding cakes and cookies. And it all looks amazing.

But like how big, just to give us a feel on like, what are your customers and clients like in your geographic reach?

Ken Jarosch (3:47)

Sure. So we are a single location retail bakery. We're located in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. We are immediately adjacent to O'Hare Airport. But what separates our community and our business from the airport is a very large industrial park. I'm told that it's the largest contiguous industrial park in the country. So it does a couple of things. It kind of buffers the noise of the airport from our community, which is a good thing. But we also have a lot of companies who are then also customers. So we do a great deal of retail business, homeowners who just come in and buy stuff for their family, and a lot of corporate work for meetings and anniversaries and retirements and all that. We have about 55 full-time employees, not full-time, but 55 total employees. About half of those are full-time. This time of year with Christmas, we kind of blossom up to about 90 or 95 employees, seasonal workers who help us pack the thousands of pounds of cookies that we make this time of year.