There's no business like dough business
Planet Money
NPR
4.6 • 30.5K Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today’s show is one such example. Our pals at Hyperfixed got a knotty question we just had to help them untangle: Why are there so many Wetzel’s Pretzels so close to one another at the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center Station?
To find out, Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi followed the dough all the way to the top. His journey led him to a jolly pretzel executive, a franchisee with a deep-fried American dream, and a brush with mall security.
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This episode was hosted by Alex Goldman and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. Hyperfixed is produced and edited by Emma Courtland, Amor Yates, Sari Soffer Sukenik and Tori Dominguez Peak. The music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and Alex Goldman. It was engineered by Tony Williams. Fact checking by Naomi Barr. The Planet Money version was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and edited by Jess Jiang. It was engineered by Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Planet Money from NPR. |
| 0:05.6 | A few months back, Planet Money got a little economic bat signal from our friends over at the podcast, Hyperfixed. |
| 0:12.4 | Hyperfixed is hosted by one of my longtime favorite radio heads, Alex Goldman. He was previously one of the hosts of Reply All. |
| 0:19.9 | And for each episode, Hyperfix takes on |
| 0:22.4 | listener problems big and small and sets out to solve them. Yeah, we get questions as small as |
| 0:28.6 | a listener said, hey, my favorite bakery shut down and now I can no longer get the cake that I love. |
| 0:33.3 | So we got Claire Saffitz, Baker Extraordinaire, to help us figure out the recipe. |
| 0:37.1 | Love that question. And we also get questions like, Baker Extraordinaire, to help us figure out the recipe. Love that question. |
| 0:38.2 | And we also get questions like, should I have children? |
| 0:41.3 | Which, as you might imagine, is a more difficult question to answer. |
| 0:44.4 | Yeah, that's a bigger, scarier one. |
| 0:47.8 | But thank you for looking into it. |
| 0:50.2 | Yeah, I do my best. |
| 0:51.8 | But the question that made us think of you guys was from a listener named Jed Cronfeld |
| 0:55.4 | because he wanted to talk about his local subway stop. |
| 0:58.9 | To call it just a subway station, it's underplaying it a little bit. |
| 1:03.1 | Jed's lived in Brooklyn for the last five years, |
| 1:05.4 | and the question on his mind had to do with the Atlantic Avenue Barclay Center Station. |
| 1:10.2 | It connects like nine or ten different lines, and then it leads to a terminal for the Long Island |
| 1:16.6 | Railroad, and then on top of that is a whole other layer that is a mall. |
| 1:21.6 | And to understand Jed's question, you first have to understand what this complex looks like. |
| 1:33.3 | The Atlantic Avenue Barkley Center Station is consistently ranked as the number one busiest station in Brooklyn. And the reason it's so busy is because this one hub connects downtown Brooklyn to the rest of New York City. |
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