It's my pleasure to welcome you to the Clark Howard Show where I'm

ambitious to serve you and empower you to make better financial decisions in

your life. Is this episode? We know, we know, we know how many things have

gotten steadily more expensive as we go around in our daily lives due to

inflation, but the big change going on, we're getting smarter, maybe on a

necessity about how we're spending those dollars. I've talked about store

brands forever. Wait till you hear what a difference it makes and what you spend

when you're out shopping. And coming up later, the average age in American is

retiring. Well, I'm gonna hold that number back because I did a quiz with the

staff and people weren't close to the number generally. The age people are

actually retiring. And there's special consequences I'm gonna share with you

about what the average American is doing today in terms of when they bag

work. So forever, I've had a bias towards store brands and I told the story on

the podcast probably four, six weeks ago about how when I was working my way

through college, I was so short of money. And we were in fact the worst

inflationary cycle of the last century when I was in college and how the

first wave of what are known as store brands today or private label or

generics had come out in that era. And that's what I lived on and they were

horrendously awful. And so not gonna tell that whole story again just wanted to

set that as a preamble. Today that's not true at all. In fact, my beloved

Costco's Kirkland signature brand is now one of the most popular brands in the

world and sales of tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars each year for

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