Jobs, the dollar, and beer in that order.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Risdahl. It is Wednesday, today the second day of July. It is always to have you along, everybody.

One of the very first things they teach you in business and economic reporting 101 is that there is very rarely just a single cause of anything that happens out there.

I mentioned that because I was thinking this morning about something the Wall Street

Journal's Greg Ipp said to me on the program on Friday that how the slowdown in consumer

spending we're starting to see is already starting to hold back economic growth.

Spending by or on behalf of consumers,

in case I haven't mentioned it in a while, amounts to give or take 70% of this entire economy.

Now, some of that slowdown in spending is because of tariffs, the effect those import taxes are having on the price of goods, of course. But most of the spending we do in this economy is on services.

And the cost of services doesn't have nearly as much to do with tariffs as it does with the cost of labor.

Marketplace is Justin Hoag. Gets us going with that.

When people buy fewer goods because tariffs make those goods more expensive, the job market feels the pinch, says Laura Veldcamp, an economics professor at Columbia.

Their jobs like salespeople, their jobs like delivery people, their jobs like the janitor of the store who cleans it.

And all of these will face less demand as well.

Feldkamp says in a slower economy, employers don't need as many workers.

If they don't want to hire new workers and there's less labor demand, they don't have to offer

as high wages to their existing workers in order to keep them.

Slower wage growth has an outsized impact on the cost of services, says Menzsche Chen,

an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Because services are provided, you know, the main input is going to be labor.

But Chin says there are factors that could actually lead to higher wages in the service sector.

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