Neely Tamminga (RTS #30) Top 4 Economic Influences On Today’s Consumer

Guest: Neely Tamminga
Topics: Consumerism, consumer economy

Transcript:

Chris Ressa 0:01
This is retail retold the story of how that store ended up in your neighborhood. I’m your host, Chris ReSSA. And I invite you to join my conversation with some of the retail industry’s biggest influencers. This podcast is brought to you by DLC management.

Welcome to retail retold everyone. Today I am joined by Neely to Minga. Neely is the CEO of distill a specialized advisory firm to retailers in the retail industry. I am excited to be joined by her she is the queen of consumer trends and economic stats, and welcome to the show, Neely.

Neely Tamminga 0:42
Oh, it’s so good to be here, Chris. Thanks for inviting me on today.

Ressa 0:46
Well, I’m excited nearly tell us a little bit more about who you are. Your a little bit about your past work history and what you do now.

Tamminga 0:55
Yeah, sure. So I’m nearly two manga. And currently the co founder of distill which is a, as you said, specialized advisory, we lead on economic data, but we actually end up doing a lot of special projects for the C suite and for boards. So we’d like to kind of finally say that if economic data were nutrition, we’d be nutritionists. And it’s important to have very nutritious economic data when you’re making big decisions with your capital. So we’re really good guides as to how to navigate truth in the data when making decisions around innovation and growth. So that’s what we do. And we’ve where we learned how to do that is from our days on Wall Street. I don’t know if you knew that. But we were actually on Wall Street for many, many years.

Ressa 1:45
And where were you on Wall Street? I know it’s only one street. But where were you?

Tamminga 1:49
Yeah, no. So I was head of the consumer Practice and Research at Piper Jaffray for that paper for almost entirely about 15 years. So just under 15 years prior to that I was at a another firm called ag Edwards and sons, which has since been like bought and then bought and bought, I think it’s eventually been rolled up maybe into Wells Fargo at this point. But um, but always covering the consumer sector where I covered stocks. I always like to say finally, things that you’d find on your wife or your girlfriends, you know, like Amex statement, those are the stocks that we typically covered. We did something that was really interesting, though, that back then, where a lot of analysts are very, very, very, very, very specialized in their silos, like, you’ll have just a department store analysts, or just the internet analysts, right. Piper was really cool. And they allowed me very early on in my tenure as an analyst to cover a consumer centric sort of approach. And so I covered home furnishings, I covered e commerce, I covered department stores, and specialty stores and beauty, where those might have been four or five different animals in other shops. It was actually just all under me when I was at Piper, and that no doubt gave me an edge, I think on Wall Street, not only with clients, but also with those companies, because we thought very holistically about who that female shopper was

Ressa 3:17
very cool. Well, what are you working on today,

Tamminga 3:22
we spend about two to three hours a day, no joke, studying the economy in the consumer, that can be anywhere from reading like big, deep dive reports around neuroscience and how neuroscience affects buying behavior. It can be going through the Fed minutes and reading what’s going on with the Fed Reserve. Or it can be building new proprietary models, we actually maintain about 35 different economic models that are proprietary to us around economic data that helps us guide clients into conversations around what’s going on with the consumer economy. So on any given point in day, we’re kind of working on one of those things, we did actually just put out a piece of research to our VIPs and our clients just giving them kind of the state of things and how we’re approaching what we’re calling the spending spree of spring right now and you know, that’s been a fun piece started to get some early response and feedback from but that’s that’s a we’re always working on something related to the consumer economy.

Ressa 4:28
I love that I spend a lot of time thinking about that given my business and I’m excited for what is to come in this show. But first let’s get to know Neely a little bit more. We’re gonna go to the segment called Clear the air. Are you ready?

Tamminga 4:45
Okay have to be alright, isn’t studying anything about clearing the air though, so I’ll do better I think on the economic work.

Ressa 4:55
You’re gonna do great. Okay, what is one skill you don’t possess but you wish you did.

Tamminga 5:01
I’m probably coding in Python.

Ressa 5:05
I love that. Yeah. Tell me why. Yeah, well,

Tamminga 5:09
because you can do a lot with Python and excel in with some of the external API’s with government data. If you don’t know what any of those words are, that’s okay. It’s I’m super nerdy. But there’s ways that you can make all of our we’re actually making all of our models or financial models that much more easily updatable through the through the government sites, and a lot of it is connecting its programming and Python into your Excel files through kind of these public API’s. And I’m having to hire it out to people who are under the age of 21. Who know this stuff really, really well. But I could probably save some money. If, if I knew how to do it myself. So but you got to outsource at some point, right? So

Ressa 5:58
totally, yeah. All right. Question two. When is the last time you tried something for the first time?

Tamminga 6:06
Hmm? Well, I feel like we all became homesteaders during

Ressa 6:13
that. So where are you quilting?

Tamminga 6:15
I did not quilt or Darn. A sock. But I did try my hand at the whole sourdough craze. Oh, you did? Yeah, I did. I mean, I was definitely the last girl picked in gym class growing up all very sciency very Nathie. So anything that’s like culinary science kind of makes me excited. So um, yeah, I did try the sourdough thing. And I did it pretty well. So made a lot of sour dough. stuff. So that was no, just some

Ressa 6:45
sandwiches that I could have on sourdough bread. Was that was that something?

Tamminga 6:48
You know, my favorite recipe actually was making sourdough non bread, like kind of like non Indian bread or whatever, you know. Yeah, I know. That was actually kind of my favorite was super tasty.

Ressa 7:00
Wow. All right. That’s a new one. No one said that yet. So sourdough sourdough. Last question. What is one thing most people agree with, but you do not?

Tamminga 7:16
Well, I haven’t done a poll. But I have a very unpopular opinion. I detest Twitter. I have a Twitter account. I don’t really advertise. I do. I think I have like Uber locked up. I don’t think I’m smart enough for Twitter. Like it’s a totally different beast. It requires like, a time and attention. So I I’m very anti Twitter, but not because of Twitter. But because I don’t think I really understand Twitter doesn’t work for you. It doesn’t work for me. So Twitter. Does that count

Ressa 7:50
that counts in my book accounts. So today, we’re going to talk about the top four economic influences on the consumer right now. That’s the topic of today. You ready to move to it?

Tamminga 8:04
Yeah. I love this stuff. You kidding? All right.

Ressa 8:07
What’s the number one? What’s one,

Tamminga 8:09
okay, we’re gonna go in order of impact, the most impact to maybe the least impact? How about that? I wait, why crescendo? Like, Let’s just Let’s just cut to the chase. Right? Because anybody’s

Ressa 8:22
busy, top impact economic influence on the consumer today

Tamminga 8:26
on walking in the savings. Okay, I mean, we have a ton of savings just sitting out on the sidelines right now with the consumer. And we’ve not seen, what we’ve seen with the savings rate over the past year has been truly unprecedented. I mean, when I saw the savings rate of 33, or I think it peaked up at 33 ish sort of present like low 30s percent back in April, May, last year, it like spiked huge, like you’ve never seen these levels of savings rate ever before in. It’s kind of bounced around, but it currently respect up to like 20 and a half percent in January. And that is when you kind of do some napkin math, you know, or even maybe some official math. We’re sitting on like $2.4 trillion of excess savings just waiting to be released back into the economy. And I mean, stimulus is great. And we’ll talk about stimulus next but the reality is is like just unlocking that savings would be incredibly powerful to the economy. So the number one force behind what we think is the spending spree spring is really the savings. So that’s a lot of SS hope, hopefully got all those lessons right?

Ressa 9:44
You got the essence right. Let’s unpack that a bit. For the listeners out there. Define when you say excess savings, what is that?

Tamminga 9:54
So the savings rate is determined by and reported by the Bureau of equity analysis. And they essentially look at all sources of income overall. And they’re looking at, you know, whether it’s wages and salaries, or what you get from the government and stimulus, or maybe your Social Security benefits. So they, they pull together all of those sources of income. And then they subtract out what you spend, you know, essentially, right. So you’re what they call your personal outlays. And that would include pretty much everything on the personal consumption expenditures index, which is basically like everything that we spend in the economy, both goods and services. And then and then you essentially come up with the savings rate, the savings levels, so they’re looking at that overall, the savings rate would be that relative to the income. But what we mean by excess savings is if you look at the 62 year average of the savings rate, which is maybe as far back as the data goes off the top of my head, maybe maybe it goes further, but right now we have in our model, 62 years. So that’s account for an average, right 62 years average is actually about 9%. So the nation kind of routinely holds about 9%. We’re currently at 20.5 or so sort of percent in January. So looking at the delta between those two would get you to about $2.4 trillion. That’s what we call excess savings above that 9% level.

Ressa 11:28
Where does paying down already spent consumer debt? factor into that?

Tamminga 11:34
It’s a really good question. Most of it is, in fact, shows up in the personal consumption expenditures component, right, like it would be factored in there some pay down of debt, and what have you, through the through the question, the survey questions that you got. Interestingly, though, and this is actually like a fun fact that we uncovered that I bet your listeners do not know this. So this is going to be the nerdiest party fact that they can have. There’s one debt that doesn’t get captured in the personal consumption expenditures component, and that is student debt. In fact, when it comes in asks the questions around educational spending, and we’ve actually looked at the actual form, where it’s asked in the survey, it says in parentheses underneath the line where people are supposed to answer it says in parentheses, do not include your saving or your student loan debt repayment. Here, they don’t want actually see that as counted as educational expense. So we do think that there, there is some debt that’s not captured in that line item. But um, I know, that’s just a nerdy little fun fact. But most most of the debt payments and interest payments are pretty much captured in that dataset.

Ressa 12:56
Okay, well, that is nerdy, fantastic to hear. Because if that gets unlocked, that will seemingly be remarkable for the economy. What will it take for it to be unlocked?

Tamminga 13:14
It’s a great question. This is when, when we often talk about our consumer spending, we have a framework by which we approach consumer spending behavior. And it’s really two simple questions. It’s two simple questions. We actually think that most economic work can get broken down into two questions in the US economy, right? Does the consumer have cash in? Do they want to spend it? Right? Those are kind of in on what? Those are the two primary questions if you can answer those two questions, you can actually understand the consumer economy. We have 35 models that support answering those questions, right, overall, but on the this is this gets to the do they want to spend it right sort of question, this is more of the art than it is the science, we think that there are some simple things that can happen. And this just comes from observing the consumer over the last 25 years, right and making a professional study of consumer behavior over the last 25 years. We sit with a lot of case studies. Warmer weather, can get people to spend going from cold to warm, seems simple. It’s true. And in fact, we’re hearing that through some of our network. When they see other authorities or influencers coming out post COVID And maybe sitting at a restaurant that could be its own unlock family celebrations. Right. A lot of people have been without family celebrations for a long time. I think it would be really hard to keep families from gathering this coming Mother’s Day. We’ve already missed a Mother’s Day, right? So missing two mother’s days in a row. Probably not going to happen. We have some delayed weddings, we have date. We have some delayed funerals and memorials. I mean, I think there’s gonna be some natural gravity as our authority say we can kind of get back together and go their permission to gather gathering will happen. And that will cause people to come out, probably look at what’s in their closets or what’s not in their closets and actually start wanting to spend. So there’s a lot of different things that can kind of start unlocking that permission to spend, again, or that willingness to spend, but we think it’s already happening.

Ressa 15:22
All right, let’s move on to number two. Yep. What is the next economic influence that’s going to impact consumer that is, that’s going to impact consumer spending.

Tamminga 15:34
So savings number one 2.4 trillion number two stimuli checks. That’s what they’re called right now in the world that we live in. They’re called stimuli checks. That would be the stimulus checks, stimulus 3.0. At this point in time, it’s, it’s a mounting the direct payments. This is the $1,400 check dynamic. That doesn’t apply to all families, but a lot of families, right overall, the it’s going to amount to about 400 billion in size, which is significantly higher than were stimulus one and stimulus to work. So stimulus one was just under 300 billion about a year ago, that actually paid out in mid April. And then we had about 160 billion approved of direct payments. It was approved in December. It was paid out in early January. And we saw phenomenal January retail sales as a result of it. So now we have a $400 billion payment stream coming out. And the IRS said even earlier this week, I released the podcast might play later, but in information might change. But the IRS did come out even just a couple of days ago, I think on the 17th of March and indicated they had already pushed out about 242 billion of that 400 billion estimated payment out into people’s accounts. So we think stimulus is underway. That’s a pretty significant source of capacity to spend.

Ressa 17:02
Do you think most of that gets spent since they have all this savings? People are gonna get that and spend that

Tamminga 17:09
they spent a lot. I mean, when you look at February, I’m sorry, January retail sales, which were revised when the February was released, okay, it was revised higher when January retail sales, which is where we saw that 100 60 billion show up, right? So just 160 retail sales were up 7.8% When it was initially reported, it was up 5.8%. And then it got upwardly revised another 200 basis points to 7.8%. That is a really high retail sales number. So it’s really high. We think it’s going to be kind of a bonkers March.

Ressa 17:43
That’s economic influence. Number two, economic influence. Number three, what is it?

Tamminga 17:50
Child Tax Credits, I think that’s the one we want to talk about. Yeah, let’s talk about child tax credits. So child tax credits, were part of the American rescue plan. And we normally have a child tax credit, so that isn’t new, but they change the amount of it, and they change the mode of it. And I think that’s what’s going to be super interesting. So, um, if you had, so in the case of my family, I have a 14 year old child, and he would, for certain income level, I believe, you know, would be $2,000 on a tax credit, right? If you kind of hid underneath a certain level of income as a reported family. And I’m just using his age as an example, because there’s going to be an age dynamic and how the American rescue plan actually had a different change in the Child Tax Credit. So now, that 2000 becomes 3000, right? For a 14 year old child, if your kid is under six years old, the 2000 goes to 3600 for most families, right? Not all families, but most families do. And what they’ve done differently to is starting this year, so they’re only doing this for one year, this kind of jump up the child tax credit. But if you make, you know, let’s just say you’re making only, you know, 30 or 40 $50,000. Like this is a significant amount of your potential discretionary income that can go up or down, right? Maybe at 50,000, just off the top my head at about $50,000 in income for a family, you might have a total of about four to $5,000 of discretionary income. So the movement of another $1,000 or $1,600 is actually pretty significant to their discretionary income I’m spending so if you want to think though, so that’s great. So more money is coming for one year, right? But how they’re paying it is going to change the patterning a little bit of retail, we think this year from July to December of 2020. Families on this track who who are going to be given this child tax credit will be prepaid essentially pre benefited, that that child tax credit and the form of monthly payments. So there’s gonna be more money in people’s pocketbooks earlier than maybe then having to wait all the way till spring tax season next year. That could be the type of flow you go from savings to stimulus to now a little bit of extra kind of payment in people’s paychecks right or in their bank accounts from the from the IRS that could take us into a really nice holiday season two on a post COVID spending spree so that could be that could be kind of interesting.

Ressa 20:34
I love the word post COVID spending spree

Tamminga 20:36
you like that? I like COVID spending spree okay, do

Ressa 20:42
Okay. Last one, economic influence number four. What is it?

Tamminga 20:48
This is a long range one. So we’ve talked about 2021. Right. But on the we get asked all the time, okay, and boardrooms right, we get asked all the time. Okay, then what? Right so after the spending spree, then what? And the one, there’s, there’s one thing that we love to kind of remind people of is we saw a ton of home buying this year, right. And I think that this is going to be something that we will keep coming back to thematically, homeownership among millennials and household formation, right? So we think that this is kind of a really a big deal. If you can imagine. The 29 year or sorry, the 25 year average of homeownership between the ages of I think it’s like 25, and 35, just called under 35. So this would be our proxy for first time homebuyers, right. So under the age of 35, the long range average or for as long as we have it, which is about 25 years, it’s been about 39% had been homeowners. And back in 2016, it troughed really low I want to say like maybe it was at 34 and a half or 35%. So it was well below what the long range average was. This last fourth quarter, we tipped back over that long range average again. So people have been buying homes and it didn’t happen just this year. We definitely noticed it this year. It’s been happening since 2016. The the millennials have been household for me at this point and actually buying homes back now to the long range average for what it should be for a first time homebuyer. There’s a lot to unpack in this, Chris, I think for your industry and for you know, the people that we advise on a day to day basis for retailers because the moment you buy a home, how you spend shifts dramatically, right? Just it changes everything. It really truly does. You now have a kitchen, you don’t share a kitchen, you have your own kitchen, right? If you might have been room meeting with someone, right? Like you now have your own space, you’re going to host your friends, you know, in your own space, instead of going out to restaurants, maybe as much as you did before, right? Brunch is in your home and not out. Right? Because you actually have a mortgage you have to pay. You know, I always like to say people poured Millennials I think that that like the short end of the stick, everyone was mocking them for eating avocado avocado toast. That was like the big meme for a while, right? Like, you know, oh, avocado toast, you know, just save your money for your avocado toast like avocado toast is the cheapest item on the menu. Right, like, thoughtful. So, um, but yeah, they’re frugal, and I think that you’re gonna see them nesting and being more at home than they’ve been at before. So that’s gonna be an interesting long range trend.

Ressa 23:50
Where does the birth rate though? Because the birth rate is in decline? Where does the birth rate play into household formation?

Tamminga 23:56
It’s a very fair question. The answer is like, you have a lot of opinions about this subject matter. We have an opinion, you might have an opinion, demographers have opinions. But no one really knows. We only know what we’ve seen in the past. But there’s no way to really correlate what we’re gonna want Mealies opinion? Yeah, so nearly his opinion is I think we will actually see a baby boom. I think it’s just delayed. I think COVID kind of delayed it. I think that the you know, kids are definitely expensive, no doubt. But if the, if we start having more incentives like $3,600 for, you know, child tax credits, you might actually you actually might see a little bit of a baby boom as people find ways to alleviate the costs associated with what it is to actually have a kid so

Ressa 24:45
I think is that to me, and you think that people are out there thinking I’m gonna get $3,600 Let’s start having babies.

Tamminga 24:55
Believe it or not, other countries do this, and they’re successful at it. So it’s not That’s without an analog.

Ressa 25:04
Interesting, okay. Okay.

Tamminga 25:08
We’ll see. It’s all opinions and conjecture until the data says otherwise. What we love to say all the time this this got me out of so many pickles when I was on Wall Street. Hey, when facts change, my mind can change. No. One will wait for facts to change.

Ressa 25:26
Understood, I get it. Okay. Those are the four economic influences. I have a couple of questions. Yeah. And I have an opinion on this one, let’s talk inflation. People think when this all happens, there’s going to be there’s a certain I said, people, there’s a certain sector out there that thinks this is going to cause massive inflation. What do you say to that?

Tamminga 25:49
Well, I mean, when you release $2.4 trillion of potential, you know, consumer demand, it’s not. It’s not unheard of, to see some transient, what they call, you know, temporary or transient inflationary pressures. I think that that’s fair. And I think that that’s accurate. We believe that when you have so many in the like, when you zoom out, in the grand scheme of things on this economy, we have 66 million people aged 62 and older in the United States economy today. Okay? That is up from just 40 million people in that age demographic just 20 years ago. And there’s something that’s very true about people who are either in or very near retirement, they report lower income, and they spend less money. So without, I think, the presence of this retiree, or what we call the great economy. Without the presence of the great economy, I would be more concerned about overall inflation. But we actually have this massive demographic deflationary force on the other side of this kind of millennial consumption wave that balances this in the end. So it’s a fair question. It’s definitely an academic exercise that I understand respect and appreciate. I think you will see pockets of it, you know, obviously, we’re seeing construction costs and labor costs and lumber costs. And, you know, but at the same time, even in the news, like today, which this will be dated, you know, whenever someone listens to this a year from now, but like in the news today, you’ve got, you know, beef prices are going to be tariffs, you know, for 30 days over in Japan, which will actually make beef prices lower here in the United States. I mean, there’s always something kind of at play that kind of moves these things up and down. So, you know, you know,

Ressa 27:37
outside of construction costs, which is wild right now, yeah, I kind of go to, if you just look at what’s happened, all this printing of money, because we’re not backed by gold has led to asset inflation, but not really inflation as from consumer price inflation. And you look at somewhere like Japan who has a debt to GDP of 200 to one, they just keep, they just keep producing more currency, and they’ve had no inflation. I think we actually have a lot of runway where we could put a lot more money in the economy, and not really have the type of consumer price inflation that concerns some. Otherwise, I think we would have already had it. Is there a concern with asset inflation? We keep expanding the bubble? Sure. There’s no doubt about that. But I’m less concerned about consumer price inflation. And I think when you put trillions of dollars in middle Americans hands, I think the things are gonna happen to the economy. You know,

Tamminga 28:43
I think in some ways, it would be welcome inflation, you know, too, right. I mean, there’s a there’s not too long ago, there was a pretty massive argument about whether or not we’re going to just be forever to deflationary. Right. And now, we’ve kind of switched that rhetoric to the other side of it. And I can understand why and and what that relates to the market and rates and what have you. But we do look at it more through the lens of the consumer economy. And it’s just too hard to ignore just this rise of non consumers or less consumers. That kind of keeps things kind of tamp down just a little bit on the on the inflation front. And you know, that the Fed doesn’t really talk about it in that way, which I think is interesting. It’s actually an opportunity, I think, for the Fed to talk a little bit more about our retiree economy, in general, but, but I do know that people who are involved in kind of these conversations around the economy do actually talk and think about that great economy. So including us,

Ressa 29:44
not a word here, often the Greek economy, but it’s real, and I think it’s a really interesting stat. So thank you for sharing. What else as it relates to consumer trends, something interesting you The word nerdy lot is there another nerdy fact that you would love to drop some knowledge on the audience with before we kind of wrap up today. Oh, putting

Tamminga 30:07
a girl on the spot. Um you know, I you know one just thing to think through you know, especially if you’ve got this is the retail retold so for retailers you know, supply chain is going to be I think a little constrained for a lot of different reasons here in the near term as we have this spring spending spree, right. But I’m really kind of enthused about what that can mean to overall margin dollars to, you know, kind of getting some high quality profitability down to the bottom line, not just on your cost savings, but actually like realizing what it is to receive in a consumer demand trend and actually be able to feed it with products that people want. You know, that feels good to the creatives, I think whenever you see your gross margin rates and your gross margin dollars, fuel your business and not just through cost savings, that tends to get a creative team creating again, and I think it’s that cycle of creation that I’ve observed over you know, 25 years that generates the innovation we need in retail that keeps the customer coming back. So I’m excited about that prospect because it’s been an all around like price deflation I think and you know, convenience and you know, what have you but I’d love to see not just the the C word convenience be talked about, but rather the seaward creative be talked about. And that does tend to happen out of expanding gross margin periods times of gross margin expansion. So I’m excited about that

Ressa 31:41
perspective. I like to say scarcity creates margin in retail. And, you know, when when everybody wants it, and there is none price goes up, and people keep trying to pay for it. I’ve recently bought a Patrick mahomes rookie card football card is quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs. And I had to click the Buy Now button on eBay, then I overpaid a little bit because the everyone just kept hitting the bid. I kept losing every bid and scarcity creates demand, scarcity

Tamminga 32:21
creates. Patrick mahomes weedy box may be intriguing to you. I don’t know, I didn’t realize you’re in the home span.

Ressa 32:29
I’m in the I like some collectibles. So that’s a story for me. All right, let’s go to the last part of the show. Are you ready? Yes. Retail wisdom. What is the last item over $20 that you bought in a store

Tamminga 32:43
shoes for my son from

Ressa 32:47
let me get locker footlocker. It’s not where I was gonna guess. Okay, no

Tamminga 32:50
locker, because it was in a strip center, not in a mall. We could get in and get out and had fabulous service in that store. And I think he got a pair of carries. Does that make sense to anyone? Oh, it makes

Ressa 33:06
sense to me. My son has carrier rooms. Okay. Yeah. Now they’re different because my son is two and a half, but he does have got a pair of LeBrons and a pair of the Kyrie Irving so

Tamminga 33:15
yeah. carries. So I was over 53rd over $20.

Ressa 33:20
Yeah, those are scarcity creates margin. Remember that one? Next, what extinct retailer? Do you wish would come back from the dead?

Tamminga 33:30
Service Merchandise? Oh, do you remember Service Merchandise?

Ressa 33:36
I love the answer. No. The store? Well, yes. As your conveyor belt.

Tamminga 33:42
I gotta tell you as a kid growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, we would go to the Service Merchandise, I don’t even know why. Okay, take us there, like after church on Sundays, or whatever. And my sister and I would just like, run around and dream about, like all the things we could buy. And, you know, take the little pencils and try to write things out. And, you know, in hindsight, I’m just kind of like, I feel like Service Merchandise was way ahead of the curve. Right?

Ressa 34:11
I’ll say that all the time. Actually, that service merchant is way ahead of the curve in retailing.

Tamminga 34:16
So sir, I’m in it was a magical place as a kid.

Ressa 34:20
Totally. We’ve had a couple of people say that and totally agree.

Tamminga 34:25
It’s so I’d like to own the rights to that to the name. I feel like we need to get on this.

Ressa 34:29
Maybe I’m not sure. It’s a good question. Last question. Yes. Ready? If Neely and Chris were shopping at Target, and I lost you, would I would I find you in

Tamminga 34:43
like the hardware auto aisle, really? Because no one’s there. And believe it or not, I am totally an introvert. Like, if I could be like that’s where you go to like re cocoon as an introvert. Looking around a ton of people, because nobody’s in that aisle.

Ressa 35:04
Oh my god that are the sewing stuff. Oh my goodness.

Tamminga 35:09
That’s where I’ll be like checking my phone just like you know, re cocooning.

Ressa 35:13
Now I know where to find you.

Tamminga 35:15
Yeah, where would you be?

Ressa 35:17
There’s so many. So my target basket has increased dramatically over the last 12 months. I have a three and a two year olds, I mean, the start of the pandemic, one and a half and, and two and a half. So my target spend is off the charts. Where would I be this? Let’s make the assumption that I’ve done the job. One of the jobs that came that I was tasked with over COVID is diapers are my responsibility in the household. So let’s assume I have diapers because if not, then that’s where you find me, but that’s too easy. So let’s assume the house is stocked with Pampers. And I don’t need diapers. If that was the case, then you’d either find me in the toy aisle or the fitness aisle.

Tamminga 36:02
Okay. Okay, I see that. I see that. Okay. That’s it. Yeah,

Ressa 36:07
but if not finding, the other one would be you know, those little Elmo pouches, sesame pouches, the fruit pouches. You might find me in the that’s like kind of buy the baby food in my target. And you might find me there and what I do, I’m pretty sure I’m I am the inventory control because when I go to Target and I see the sesame pouches I buy literally top to bottom rack, I buy the entire shelf, we go through those. That’s like the one thing that I don’t know they say they’re organic. I don’t know how good they are for my kids. I love these pouches so I need them in stock all that in diapers I needed my house,

Tamminga 36:52
keep them happy. Keep them happy, ya know for sure. Your inventory control. You know, being on Wall Street I would be on so many store walks. Right? That was a big part of what we did field research every single week, right? We’re in stores. I find myself like folding refolding all the stacks of sweaters. Because we wouldn’t be in there all the time. So but to be away from the people I’ve been auto i Oh,

Ressa 37:19
great. Well, nearly this was great. Thank you so much. My pleasure.

Tamminga 37:22
Thanks for having me. This has been a ton of fun Chris. Thanks for

Ressa 37:27
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