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Reema Khrais

Host and Reporter

SHORT BIO

Reema Khrais is the host of the Marketplace podcast, “This is Uncomfortable,” a narrative show about life and how money messes with it.

Reema first joined Marketplace in 2016 as a general assignment reporter where she covered everything from immigration and education to retail and employment. In the summer of 2018, she was selected as an ICFJ Bringing the World Home Fellow and traveled to Turkey to report on the economic lives of Syrian refugees for Marketplace. Prior to that, she covered education policy for North Carolina Public Radio as the station’s Fletcher Fellow. Reema got her start in audio as an NPR Kroc Fellow, which included a reporting stint at WNYC. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is fluent in Arabic.

She currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where she spends her free time hiking, making ceramics and spoiling her orange cat.

Latest Stories (219)

All is not gloomy in retail sales

Jun 14, 2017
There are new numbers out today that show just how much we spent on retail last month. And it was not so great. Retail sales were down 0.3 percent, which is the biggest monthly decline in more than a year. Department stores in particular have been struggling, but we wondered if there are any silver […]

Macy’s tries another strategy to hang in the retail game

Jun 14, 2017
Macy’s, like so many other department giants, is reeling from falling sales. Dozens of it stores have shut down as it loses foot traffic to online competition. To reboot itself, Macy’s says it has a new strategy: It plans to offer more exclusive lines. Click the audio player above to hear the full story.

Uber fires star engineer at heart of self-driving legal battle

May 31, 2017
A top and very expensive engineer at Uber is out. The company has fired the engineer at the center of a high-stakes legal battle with Waymo, the self-driving venture of Alphabet’s Google. Earlier this year, Anthony Levandowski was accused of stealing trade secrets from his former job at Google. After he refused to hand over evidence, […]

Google tries to connect the dots between online ads and offline buys

May 24, 2017
Online shopping is sometimes just that — shopping. The actual buying happens later — in an actual store. Until now, retailers haven’t been able to connect those dots. Google says it has a tool that will let them connect online clicks to in-store buys. Good for Google, which may be able to sell more search […]

Amazon would be a disrupter if it sold prescriptions

May 17, 2017
A report from CNBC says Amazon is getting more serious about becoming a place for you to buy your prescription drugs. Amazon could be a major disrupter, as it has been when it entered other sectors, from books to groceries. The hundreds of billions of dollars Americans spend on prescriptions every year make the pharmacy business […]

Didn't pick up your rental car? No problem.

May 15, 2017
Why is it that rental car companies don't penalize customers for flaking at the last minute?
“Some rental car companies have been afraid to charge for no-shows with the fear that their competitors won’t and it would be used as a marketing campaign against them,” said John Healy, who follows the car rental industry for Northcoast Research.
Chris Hondros/Getty Images

H2-B visa demand is leaving some businesses understaffed for summer

May 10, 2017
Unemployment is at its lowest rate in roughly a decade. For lots of businesses, that means summer help is going to be harder to find — and more expensive. That’s especially true for smaller resort businesses that rely on temporary foreign workers to staff their hotels and restaurants. Those workers typically come on what’s known […]

Paid interns are averaging $3,000 a month

May 4, 2017
It’s high time for students to start thinking about that summer internship — and many should get lucky landing one since internships are up for the first time in years, according to the head of the research division for the National Association of Colleges and Employers. It’s hard to know how many interns work for […]

Individual retirement accounts aren’t attracting enough of the right individuals

May 2, 2017
IRAs were created to give people without employer-sponsored retirement plans a tax-free incentive to save.

Education Department learns how to downsize as threat of budget cuts looms

Apr 27, 2017
'There just is no easy or cheap way to reduce the size of government workforce,' public policy expert says.
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos speaks as President Donald Trump and educator Kenneth Smith listen during a parent-teacher conference listening session at the Roosevelt Room of the White House.
Alex Wong/Getty Images