Hey there, hope you had a great week. I want to thank everyone who submitted questions to "Marketplace" host Kai Ryssdal about inflation. Check out his answers here, and feel free to email me followups. I’d love to stump him.

The American consumer has been surprisingly resilient, but we got new data today showing rising prices might be finally taking a toll. We’ll break it down, and tell you about a new kind of free retail therapy, below. But first, let’s meet the Michiganders getting free solar panels. — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor  

Bruce Schauer is thrilled to show off all 10 of his new solar panels. When the city offered to put them on his house for free, he signed up right away.

“I've been wanting it for a long time. I'm the first one in the neighborhood to get it put up,” he says.

He lives with his daughter, his granddaughter, and his great-granddaughter, and they’re no strangers to power outages. Michiganders have some of the least reliable electricity in the country.

Electric utilities have been facing all kinds of problems recently. Data centers are gobbling up every megawatt-hour they can, rates are up, and extreme weather is causing reliability issues.

“About a year ago, we had a blackout here, and I lost a freezer full of meat and a refrigerator full of meat,” Schauer said.

The solution to a lot of those problems is what’s known as local power. Solar panels and batteries, for instance, can reduce demand on the grid, produce electricity cheaply, and they can supply power when the grid can’t.

The downside is that installing those solutions can cost consumers tens of thousands of dollars. That’s why the City of Ann Arbor has started installing solar panels and batteries for free.

Last month, during one of those really bad summer heat waves, Schauer’s neighborhood lost power for two days.

This isn’t just about spoiled meat. Schauer’s daughter needs daily shots for her arthritis, and they need to be refrigerated. Before the panels were installed, a power outage that long could have been devastating. But this time, the battery kicked on, and Schauer’s family had power.

“Our medicine was saved. Our food was saved. It was a godsend. It was amazing,” said his granddaughter, April Adkins.

The godsend has a name: the Ann Arbor Sustainable Energy Utility. The city’s residents voted to create it a couple years back, but there is a catch.

Heat and cheese don’t mix, unless we’re talking fondue. Europe is experiencing its fifth heat wave since May. That’s disrupting Italy’s cheese banks, where wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano are held as collateral. Gioino came on our show to explain how this unique financing works.

Dopamine Shop is an online “retailer” out of South Korea that doesn’t actually sell anything. Users can browse and buy items, but they never arrive and no money is exchanged. Why would anyone build such a thing, much less use it?

Experts told RestofWorld it’s a natural evolution of “retail therapy,” but better for the bank account. A similar ersatz delivery site, FoodNeverComes, is more explicit about its goal: to help people wean off their phones.