All right, well, here we go on a Monday. Hey, everybody. I'm Kai and Rizzo. Welcome back to Make Me Smart. I am back. It is good to be back making today. Make sense is what we do on this podcast.

Yeah, and I'm Maryl Seguera. It's exciting to be here again. And welcome back Kai from vacation.

Yeah, I was. I was away. We went well, we went to Spain. Barcelona Madrid had a fabulous time went to an FC Barcelona game. Really enjoyed it. I did catch a little cold. You could probably hear that. But it was really good. It was really good. It was good to be away. Good to be back as always.

All right. So what's the news? You go first. You got a couple. I got a couple. You go first.

Okay, so I saw this piece about Etsy, the platform where individual small retailers, they sell things like purses and candles and stuff like that. A bunch of Etsy sellers are going on strike. At least that's what they're calling it because they don't exactly work for Etsy, right? But they, but they're calling it a strike. It's about 14,000 of them out of 5.3 million.

And they say that they're not okay with Etsy raising its transaction fees. The company says that it needs the money so that it can market the seller's products. But these retailers are like, actually, you know, we don't need more marketing because we're just, I'm just an individual, you know, Candle maker and I can have all the business I can handle maybe.

So I don't like that you're taking the money, taking money away from me and diverting it towards marketing. And I think what is really interesting about this is the value of a platform like this. If you're a small retailer, you kind of have to play with the big companies like whether it's Amazon or Facebook or, you know, Etsy.

And it's like you own your own business, but you're really not totally independent because when on a whim or maybe not maybe that's unfair, maybe not on a whim. But when one of these big companies decides to make a change, it can have a huge impact on your business. And that's just part of the game.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And it's, you know, small, small business people somehow always get screwed and the platforms have all the power and it'll be interesting to see how this one turns out.

Yeah. And I don't know if it's really going to, like I said, 14,000 out of 5.3 million. I'm not sure that it's going to change any minds at Etsy, but there might be out of those 14,000. Some of those sellers might just say, you know, this isn't worth it anymore. And I've heard from retailers like that before who they get enough, they get enough attention or enough sales on Etsy that ultimately then they say, hey, I'm going over my own website and their customers follow them. So that could happen.

Yeah, no, totally good. All right. That's item one. You're all retail today. Go ahead. Go to the next one. Yeah. So Kmart, I just saw a story that reminded people that there are only three Kmart stores left now. Wow. Is that right? Unbelievable.

Yeah. Yeah. And there were at one time about, I think, 2000 store Kmarts. It just made me think about how my brother used to work at Kmart when we were in high school, stocking shelves or whatever is one of his first jobs.

And a lot of us have memories of these retailers. They became a part of our lives in some way. We have either nice memories of them or annoying memories of them. Like when I worked at Hollister and had to deal with that awful music and the perfume that was just like completely unbearable and gave me a headache.

And it was always dark in there. But it's you have these really distinct memories. And then the companies are just gone like that. Yeah. Yeah. Got three stores. That's kind of wild. That's like sort of there on blockbuster watch now, right? And in three years, there's going to be some story about the only Kmart left on the planet. And it's going to be in some small down in like North Dakota.

I know it'll probably be like a tourist attraction at that point. That's right. That's right. That's right. As is, I think that that blockbuster that used to be an organized one. I don't even know if it closed might even still be open. I don't even know. I don't even know.

Okay. So I've got two. One of which is a quickie. But it's it's a sign of virus to come. So Philadelphia is going to reinstate its mask indoor mask mandate effective next week.

And I just think we all having been enjoying now a number of months of being able to not have to we can if you choose right I do choose to wear my mask and the grocery store and stuff.

But you don't have to if you don't want to. And now Philadelphia is saying you kind of have to when I think we all just need to be ready for that because it will be an attitude adjustment for a whole lot of people.

You know, and obviously we're going to see it on a lot of blue states probably not in as many red states. But I think people are going to have some adjusting to do. And so that's that's my one quickie news item. My number two news item today.

It fits under the heading of Elon Musk really is a jerk and I think I've said that before on this podcast. I know I've said it to Molly on on marketplace, but definitely on this podcast.

So we learned last week that Elon Musk now owns 9.2% of the company and the company being not really stupid right the CEO of Barack Agarwal on the board director said holy cow.

Elon Musk the richest man in the world owns 10% of our company 9.2%. We need to get him inside the tent as it were because Mr. Musk has a history of just lobbying grenades at Twitter, especially recently.

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