Hello, hope you’ve had a good week. 

Last Friday’s jobs report showed us the economy might not be as strong as we thought, and evidence mounted that President Donald Trump’s tariffs are beginning to raise prices. This week, new survey data and a spate of corporate earnings reports indicated American consumers are starting to pull back.

China’s first Legoland opened this month in Shanghai featuring over 75 rides, attractions and shows including a rollercoaster, boat ride and castle.

Tickets cost double the price of some local theme parks at 549 yuan ($77) for adults and 439 yuan ($62) for children.

But the thrilling rides for young children and Lego sculptures are worth it for Legoland visitor and father-of-two Cai Tian.

He said his boys, ages 4 and 7, have a limitless budget at Legoland. However, he and his wife are scaling back in other areas.

“We won’t hire nannies if we can manage. We won’t buy things if we can make it,” he said.

Since last fall, China’s government has tried to boost spending by cutting interest rates and rolling out subsidies for consumers to upgrade things like fridges, furniture and cell phones. Sales in those categories shot up 23% to 30% in the first half of this year. But overall retail sales, which are used as a proxy for consumption, grew only  5% from January to June compared to the same period last year. That is slower than pre-pandemic levels of 7% to 8%.

There is a global focus on China’s domestic consumption because the country is reliant on exports. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly said that China’s imbalanced economy negatively affects its trading partners, including America. China is accused by the U.S. and European Union of manufacturing too much, exporting its excess stock overseas at below-market rates, and killing its foreign competitors. Chinese officials deny the charge but also seem to acknowledge more needs to be done to boost domestic consumption.

Spending on services, which includes entertainment, was slightly higher than goods in the first half of this year, up 5.3%.

The unemployment rate for college graduates aged 22 to 27 hit 5.8% in March, compared to an overall unemployment rate of just 4.2%. This gap is the largest disparity between young graduates and the general population in over 30 years, excluding the temporary pandemic-related spike in 2021.

So what’s going on?

One reason is that too many jobs now require degrees that they never used to. Not because the work got harder — but because more people have degrees.

“In society at large, managers have come to see a degree as a minimum ticket to ride,” said Matt Sigelmann, president of the Burning Glass Institute, a research organization focused on the future of work and workers.

This shift in perspective has come to harm young graduates more than anyone else.

“Since 2023, like 85% of the rise of the unemployment rate is concentrated in new market entrants,” said Suzanne Kahn, vice president of Think Tank at the Roosevelt Institute. “And the rise in unemployment for college graduates has been like triple that of everybody else, which is just, I think, sort of unprecedented.”

According to Sigelmann, 10 million new college graduates are going to join the workforce over the next decade. These graduates will be stepping into a workforce that is increasingly reluctant to make room for them.

“Most of the net additions to the workforce over the coming decade are going to be college educated,” Sigelmann said.

Marketplace’s Alice Wilder has been waiting for a love letter to arrive at her home since March. It was sent by her boyfriend David Scarisbrick, who lives 800 miles away in Lake Forest, Illinois.

Years of financial troubles and political turmoil mean that those still sending letters are experiencing longer delivery times. That’s leading Wilder to consider switching to a more modern form of communication: email. 

That’s bad news for the USPS. The Office of the Inspector General reports that the volume of first class mail has dropped 52 percent between 2008 and 2023 — and they attribute much of that to what they call “electronic diversion,” the spread of smartphones and digital communication in the U.S. 

The pandemic has only exacerbated the problem, said Karen Hult, professor of political science at Virginia Tech. “We send emails, we do other kinds of things and so I think that’s among the revenue concerns that the postal service has faced,” Hult said. 

But can an email match the romance of a handwritten love letter? Not according to Hult. “There can be a real privacy to letters, there also is just a real intimacy to reading people’s handwritten comments,” Hult said. 

Music generated by artificial intelligence started appearing on streaming services just a few months after ChatGPT made its debut. First it was grist for bot listeners to artificially generate royalties, then it was attention-grabbing loosies with crass titles.

Now, at least one AI band seems to be breaking through. Generative music project The Velvet Sundown has accumulated nearly 1 million monthly Spotify listeners with uncanny sounding indie rock. We played a track for Nika Danilova, a real-life musician who performs under the name Zola Jesus. She’s not a fan.

“To put me alongside Velvet Sundown or whatever, it’s like, it feels a little condescending in a way. It kind of degrades the context of what I devoted my entire life for,” she told Marketplace’s Matt Levin.