What we found in Buffalo, NY: Courage, innovation and a larger story behind the data
What we found in Buffalo, NY: Courage, innovation and a larger story behind the data
This week, as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the 6th time in less than seven months, Marketplace is broadcasting a series of stories from Buffalo, New York.
Buffalo is a place where wages for the lowest-paid workers in the country have increased a lot in recent years — more than 40 percent according to one analysis by the payroll processing company ADP. At the same time, the cost of living is going up.
“Marketplace” host Ryssdal and ADP’s chief economist, Nela Richardson, spoke with small business owners, workers, and other people around Buffalo about how they’re experiencing this economic moment. After a few days of reporting on the ground, Ryssdal and Richarson sat down to reflect. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Kai Ryssdal: We’ve been reporting in Buffalo for a couple of days. And when we talked at the coffee shop, we talked about hope. Tell me what you’ve seen that gives you hope about Buffalo.
Nela Richardson: I think the bicycle [shop] owner said it best, Ethan. It’s looking for those hills and not being afraid of them, and getting over the hill. And they’re doing it. You hear about confidence and optimism all the time — you hear about it in the stock market, you hear about it in the economy, you hear about it in whether inflation has peaked or not. Hope is different. Hope is like, “I see the obstacles, I know that these obstacles can overcome me, but I have hope that I can get over them.” And that’s what I see in Buffalo.
Ryssdal: About that hope though — the challenge, of course, is for the lowest of the low-income people that we were talking about in the coffee shop the other day. They gotta get food on the table every single day. They gotta get by on wages that, while up a lot, are still relatively low. You talked a lot about coming from a city just like this. If you went back to your hometown [of Richmond, Indiana] today, what do you think you would see? Would you see the same set of problems?
Richardson: Absolutely. In fact, if I go to a lot of small towns, you’d see the same issue. And the thing is, we get to see it. Think of all the policymakers and the economists sitting in New York and D.C. who don’t see it. And I think there’s a detachment between the numbers, and the data, and the people who those numbers represent.
Ryssdal: So look, how do we make that connection? Because that’s literally my job, is to tell the stories of the people in places like Buffalo so that people who are in positions of power can make decisions that affect people’s lives. How do we do that?
Richardson: Well, I think talking to people is a great start. I’ve learned so much in the last two days. I’ve learned about innovation. The business owners that we talked to, two of them started businesses in a pandemic. It’s like, “Hey, the world is on fire. Let me start a business.” I mean, who does that? Who starts a business first of all? It’s someone who knows how to deal with ambiguity, and so many of our policymakers don’t. And that’s what all these people exemplify. People who are on fixed incomes? They start the month with a set amount of money, and they make sure that money lasts the entire 30 to 31 days, and they’re innovative about it. They use what they have to get to where they need to go. And I think that that’s something that’s missing in a national discourse about our big problems.
Ryssdal: You know what word I didn’t hear at all the last couple of days, which we hear all the time in the national discourse, and I’m as guilty of it as anybody? Recession. I didn’t hear that word at all.
Richardson: What does “recession” mean when you’re in a daily struggle? I mean, recession is something that you get to reflect on. That’s not your day to day. That’s not what you open your restaurant or your business doors thinking about. You think about how you get customers in the door today. Recession is something you think about maybe if you turn on the news later that night. It’s not how you guide your day.
Ryssdal: The reason we’re here is because we’ve been talking to you and your folks for a long time about the data you have. And about what that shows you about cities and people and incomes. Granted, this is an anecdotal question, but was your data generally validated by what you saw here?
Richardson: Yes. Our data is a reflection of a human experience. And this was the first time I saw the data match to a human experience. Our data showed that low-wage workers in Buffalo saw a 40% year-over-year increase. That’s not the full story. There’s a whole experience beyond that story. There’s an experience from the shop owner’s perspective that they can’t get those same workers at the price that they paid them last year. There’s an experience about people who can’t work and what that means in terms of inflation. There’s the whole housing component about being able to build a business based on your passion because it’s affordable. You can do that here in Buffalo. So yeah, I would say that the data was validated, but it also showed us that there was a larger story behind that data point.
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