Shopping through a K-shaped holiday season
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.8 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As another holiday season kicked off on Black Friday, finding the perfect gift is top of mind for many. But how much will weary American consumers be willing to spend this year? Based on early data … it’s a lot! Marketplace’s Kristin Schwab joins Kimberly to explain why the K-shaped economy may explain the contradiction and why AI is making its way into Americans’ shopping habits. Plus, we’ll play a round of Half Full/Half Empty!
Here’s what we talked about on the show today:
- ”September retail sales fail to impress” from Marketplace
- ”Black Friday, Cyber Monday spending expected to top records” from Marketplace
- ”Black Friday Sales Spike Despite Economic Uncertainty, Study Shows—Here’s Why” from Forbes
- “‘Tis the season for credit card debt” from Marketplace
- ”How are retailers benefiting from the "buy now, pay later" boom?” from Marketplace
- ”What is your Spotify listening age?” from Marketplace
- ”More than 8 in 10 Americans are more likely to purchase secondhand gifts this year” from Retail Brew
- ”Target Launches New AI-Powered Features to Make Holiday Shopping Easier, Smarter and More Fun” from PR Newswire
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams and welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us, and we try to make the day make sense. |
| 0:14.2 | Thank you for joining us while we are doing our regular happy hour. Thanks for whether you're on the YouTube live stream or listening later on the |
| 0:21.8 | podcast. We really appreciate you hanging out with us on a Friday afternoon or evening, depending on |
| 0:26.9 | where you are. This is Economics on Tap, and it is the last Friday was Black Friday. And so because |
| 0:34.4 | it was Black Friday, we wanted to bring in our retail expert because it was a |
| 0:38.9 | huge week for retailers in the United States. So here for our holiday shopping check-in is Marketplace |
| 0:44.5 | correspondent, Kristen Schwab. Welcome back, Kristen. Hey, Kimberly. Before we get to some retail news, |
| 0:51.9 | because I know that is your area of expertise, let's get to some drinks. |
| 0:55.1 | What you got? |
| 0:56.8 | Okay. |
| 0:57.4 | So I brought a paper plane, which usually isn't a coop glass, but I brought it in this class that you gifted me because it felt very appropriate. |
| 1:08.7 | Kimberly gave this to me and my husband only got married this summer, which was very nice. |
| 1:15.6 | Yeah, usually it's a coop drink. |
| 1:17.7 | This is a slushy version of a paper plane. |
| 1:21.2 | So it's Amaro, Aparol, bourbon and lemon juice. And the lemon juice makes it so that you can put in |
| 1:29.9 | the freezer and it just freezes like a little bit into a slushy. It's a smitten kitchen |
| 1:34.1 | recipe for anybody who wants to look it up. And it has been in my freezer waiting for me for |
| 1:40.5 | like a month. So it can hang out there for for important times like this. |
| 1:45.2 | I love that. That's a that's a really good idea to sort of batch make your cocktail so they're |
| 1:49.5 | ready to go. I need to. No, I don't need to do that actually. That's probably a terrible idea for me. |
| 1:55.5 | Could be dangerous. I got some pomegranates from the store earlier this week. And so I decided to smush up some of the seeds, and I made myself a pomegranate margarita. |
| 2:06.3 | I know it's a very summery drink, but, you know, I felt like, hey, I've got pomegranates and, you know, margarita ingredients. |
... |
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